Glorifying god’s name

In Nigeria, an Islamic group called Boko Haram has been murdering their Christian compatriots in an effort to drive the Christians out of northern Nigeria. The details are sordid; automatic rifles, bombs, unarmed citizens gunned down en masse, churches being blown up, more than 500 killed in total.

But there is a theme, and it’s a telling one.

Witnesses said gunmen burst into the hall and shouted "God is great" as they opened fire.

“Gunmen who are, from all indications, members of Boko Haram came in large numbers and have encircled police headquarters. They chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is Great] and fired indiscriminately,” a resident told AFP.

God is a self-righteous delusion in the heads of believers that justifies terror and death.

God is not great.

God seems to be more on the level of a conscienceless thug with a gun.

I’m sure they are a very spiritual couple

Kristy Bamu and his two sisters were visiting their older sister, Magalie Bamu, and her partner, Eric Bikubi, over Christmas in London. Initially, it was apparently a jolly time…and then Eric got it into his head that his three visitors were witches.

The court was told that over a period of days the pair, originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, attempted to exorcise evil spirits they believed were in three of the children – Kristy, his sister Kelly, 20, and their 11-year-old sister, who cannot be named. Bikubi refused "to let them eat, drink or sleep for days, while the punishments became increasingly violent, with [the attackers] using the many implements found in the flat as weapons of torture", Altman said.

During their ordeal the siblings were forced to pray and chant throughout several nights and, in a "staggering act of depravity and cruelty", the defendants recruited sibling against sibling as "vehicles for their violence", said Altman.

Kristy became the focus of Bikubi’s attention, the court heard. He allegedly struck the boy with a hammer in the face, knocking out his teeth; on another occasion he shoved a metal bar into the teenager’s mouth, the court heard.

When Kelly attempted to hit her brother using something light, she was ordered to use a heavier implement. In a desperate attempt to prevent any further suffering, Kristy and his two sisters eventually admitted to being sorcerers, said Altman. "As Kristy’s injuries became ever more severe he even pleaded to be allowed to die," he added.

They gave him his wish and drowned him in the bathtub.

A couple of people believe there is magic in the world and that their delusions are real, and a 15 year old boy ends up tortured to death.

The couple are denying that they committed murder; Eric Bikubi claims “diminished responsibility”, apparently because he’s an evil idiot who believes in spirits.

Santorum will tell you how and when you can have sex

He’s a very creepy man. His wife had an abortion to save her life, but he wants to criminalize your abortion. And that’s not all: sex is supposed to be procreative, so he wants to criminalize contraception. In this long painful video, he preaches against gay sex, against contraception, and says we ought to be urging families to have many more children, and thinks a tax deduction of $20,000 per child is reasonable.

So “contraception is a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to the way things are supposed to be”. Woo hoo! I love that license! I don’t think I want to vote for a guy who’d take it away.

Bonus! Santorum also thinks most scientists are amoral.

I have to say, he’s doing a terrible job of campaigning for my vote.

The petty cowardice of Christianity

They simply cannot tolerate the idea that other people think differently than they do, and so they play the most petty, trivial games. Cee-lo Green sang Lennon’s Imagine at New Year’s, and he just had to change the words “no religion too” to “all religion is true” — not just changing the meaning, but changing it to something that makes no sense at all.

It’s only a pop song, but it’s the same sentiment that led the Church to hammer the penises off of classical sculpture; that inspired Islam to blow up Buddhas; that has sects fighting over who owns which piece of rock in Jerusalem; that leads cults to burn books and records. They must pretend that dissent not only does not exist at all, but never existed any where at any time.

At this time of year, there are choirs singing great pieces of Christian music everywhere, and there are atheists raising their voices to sing the St Matthew Passion or Messiah — and you don’t hear them demanding that the Vox Christi be silenced or mention of God be expurgated.

Why? Because we can celebrate the music without having to pretend that Bach and Handel were atheists. Because we aren’t afraid.

But Christians are. I regard them with the contempt I reserve for all superstitious cowards.

Next year, we must wage the War on Christmas harder

I’m glad Christmas is over. This year seems to have been particularly awful in its encouragement of theological drivel, perhaps because the forces of churchy darkness are feeling increasingly desperate and irrelevant…so they marshal their paladins to go forth and wallop us with nonsense, in the hopes that we’ll become stupid enough to believe them. Unfortunately for them, the best they can do for paladins is that drone with all the expressivity of a dead mackerel, Alister McGrath, and the jolly old elf with dementia, John Lennox. I’m going to address their last-minute eructations of Christmas apologetics, but be warned — they’ll be back next year, like the hauntings of ghosts of Christmases Imaginary.

[Read more…]

Should we try harder next year?

The “DefendChristians” website has a poll to determine the Top Ten Anti-Christian Acts of 2011. There are a few truly despicable things in there: apparently, someone threw a firebomb at an elderly woman protesting a reproductive health clinic in Kalispell, an action I would unambiguously condemn, if it happened. Unfortunately, it seems to have been news only among the fanatical anti-abortion websites; I can’t find any mention on more reliable sources, and it’s peculiar anyway: a fire bomb was thrown at someone, and no one was hurt, and the demonstration went on anyway? That’s a rather pathetic effort.

I would have voted for that as a bad act, if there were any reasonable confirmation that it happened. But the rest…well here’s a sample.

  • Old Navy began sponsoring the pro-homosexual “It Get’s Better” campaign by giving proceeds from certain clothing to the campaign. The television and online campaign shows a variety of people living as homosexuals encouraging other’s to come out claiming “It Get’s Better,” and that there hopeful future for those who live as homosexuals.

  • A National Public Radio (NPR) official was caught on video making vicious anti-Christian remarks to persons who identified themselves as members of the Muslim Brotherhood who were promising millions of dollars to NPR. In the video, the NPR official called Evangelical Christians uneducated racists who hate and fear all foreigners.

  • Alabama Governor, Robert Buckley, spoke on Martin Luther King Day at the historic Dexter Ave Baptist Church in Montgomery, the church Dr. King pastored. In his remarks the Governor said, “Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.” The Jewish Anti-Defamation League falsely labeled this anti-Semitic.

  • A Christian bakery owner in Iowa was boycotted after she refused to make a wedding cake for a lesbian’s couples “wedding.”

The most horrible anti-Christian oppression going on in the country right now is that homophobic/xenophobic Christians are being called out on their bigotry. And maybe some ineffective crank in Montana threw a flaming pop bottle at Christians demanding that women’s health be compromised.

We’re terrible at this pogrom business. And the Christians are really feeble, whiny martyrs.

And all the Whos down in Whoville…

According to Time magazine, we’re apparently a nation of gentle New Age bliss-ninnies. All that sectarian stuff, the Nicene creed, even Jesus…nobody really believes all that with any conviction.

Just as Christian fundamentalists insist on a literal reading of the Bible, angry atheists tend to insist that belief in God qualifies you as a raving creationist.

Here’s what they refuse to get: Yes, Christians believe that Jesus’ nativity was a virgin birth and that he rose from the dead on Easter. But if you were to show most Christians incontrovertible scientific proof that those miracles didn’t occur, they would shrug — because their faith means more to them than that. Because in the end, what they have faith in is the redemptive power of the story. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, an agnostic says to his Catholic friend, “You can’t seriously believe it all … I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.”

“Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.”

“But you can’t believe things simply because they’re a lovely idea.”

“But I do. That’s how I believe.”

I’m willing to bet it’s how most believers believe. Before Hitchens died at 62 from esophageal cancer, he made a point of declaring he was certain no heaven awaited him. But that swipe at the faithful always misses the point. Most of us don’t believe in God because we think it’s a ticket to heaven. Rather, our belief in God — our belief in the living ideal of ourselves, which is something even atheists ponder — instills in us a faith that in the end, light always defeats darkness (which is how people get through the wars and natural disasters I cover). That does make us open to the possibility of the hereafter — but more important, it gives us purposeful inspiration to make the here and now better.

What a load of reeking bullshit.

Try telling the congregation at your local Catholic church that if it’s more convenient for them, they might just as well attend the Baptist church, if it’s closer. Then go to the Baptist church and suggest likewise that the Catholic church is a lovely building and the priest is very nice and they should switch.

Try suggesting to the 40% of Americans who oppose good science in the classroom that they should be fine with teaching evolution, since their faith is all about love and light, and Adam and Eve are just lovely myths.

Apparently, no one ever really gets indignant at being cheerfully told “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”. Everyone is untroubled by trivial differences in emphasis, and all that matters is that we’re all happy in our own way.

There is no hell. No one believes in it, anyway. We’re all about light defeating darkness, so the screams of the damned in torment are only invented by a few imaginative horror story authors. No true Christian believes in such evil!

Close your eyes real tight and imagine real hard, and all those people demanding that the schools sponsor public prayer will just vanish … and Tim Tebow is just expressing his appreciation of the Buddha, and his missionary family thinks Catholics are just as Christian as they are.

We can revoke all the special parking dispensations the clergy has at hospitals, because they aren’t really needed to usher the dying into heaven, after all. And isn’t it more important that the afflicted spend more time with their loved ones than that irrelevant guy with a funny collar?

Rick Perry wasn’t actually elected to be governor of Texas. Rick Santorum is just gentle humorous satire (come on, the name is a dead giveaway — no one would call themselves that if they were serious). For that matter, the entire slate of Republican presidential candidates is a hallucination.

The Mormons didn’t pump millions of dollars into the fight for Proposition 8 in California. They just believe in Love! And the Living Ideal of Themselves! And Lovely Fucking Ideas!

I could go on. Tim Padgett, the author of that tripe in Time, is simply a delusional liar — while accusing Hitchens of taking religion too literally, he goes far, far off the deep end to conjure up an entirely imaginary Christendom of pablum and soft, soothing breezes and no difficulties whatsoever, where everyone is stretched out on a comfortable sofa with some really good weed, toking themselves into half-lidded and smashingly baked heedless bliss. He himself might be wallowing deeply in that gooey non-sectarian treacle — these people do exist, from Karen Armstrong to Chris Stedman — but they are in total denial of reality. I can go down to the coffee shop on Tuesday mornings and find the Men’s Bible Study group going strong on the reality of Noah’s Ark and the submission of women; I can open up the local paper and find letters to the editor complaining about the university’s awful tolerance of The Gays; I could, if I were sufficiently masochistic, attend any of a dozen churches here in town and find people who will tell me that believing the earth is millions of years old (or older!) means I will burn in hellfire for eternity (oh, wait, I have done that! Painful, it was).

Unlike Padgett, I have a realistic view of religion. I do not think all Christians are creationists, as he falsely claims, but I also know for a fact that most Christians are damned insistent on the literal reality of Jesus, Heaven, Hell, and their sectarian views about how one can achieve or avoid a meeting with any of them.

Predatory and reptilian

Thomas Nast, the 19th century political cartoonist who gave us our standard image of both Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, is going to be enrolled in the New Jersey Hall of Fame. This isn’t really controversial: he was extremely influential. He was not entirely a nice guy, though, being a bit of a nativist and also responsible for promoting the stereotype of the Irish as violent drunks…so I would hope that his exhibit in the Hall of Fame would also highlight his bigotry. That’s not acceptable to Bill Donohue, though — Nast is the subject of his latest fit of apoplexy, because, unfortunately, while having a biased attitude towards the Irish people, he also portrayed Catholicism accurately.

I confess. I laughed.