An inappropriate god

The Technology Student Association sounds like a good deal: it’s a nationwide organization dedicated to encouraging students to pursue careers in technology, engineering, and science.

But…they have a creed, which is a little weird. Reading it, it mainly seems to espouse respectable values, until you hit the last sentence and screech to a stop so fast your eyeballs will rattle.

I believe that Technology Education holds an important place in my life in the technical world. I believe there is a need for the development of good attitudes concerning work, tools, materials, experimentation, and processes of industry.

Guided by my teachers, artisans from industry, and my own initiative, I will strive to do my best in making my school, community, state, and nation better places in which to live.

I will accept the responsibilities that are mine. I will accept the theories that are supported by proper evidence. I will explore on my own for safer, more effective methods of working and living.

I will strive to develop a cooperative attitude and will exercise tact and respect for other individuals. Through the work of my hands and mind, I will express my ideas to the best of my ability.

I will make it my goal to do better each day the task before me, and to be steadfast in my belief in my God, and my fellow Americans.

What do gods and nationalism have to do with scientific values? Where is the proper evidence that supports that bizarre theory? It’s also odd because this is the only place in the entire website for the TSA that even mentions this god thingie. It shouldn’t be in their creed as a matter of principle, but also, if it’s important enough to make it part of a kind of oath for every member, isn’t it odd that everything else about the organization operates without a single religious reference?

It made my skin crawl

Ophelia has posted the creepiest explanation of Biblical marriage ever. This is apparently an explanation from some devout Baptist man about his absolute dominance over the woman he is poking with his penis; she has no say at all in anything, by this account.

As Bible-believing Baptists who hold to reformed theology, X and I believe that God is sovereign in choosing who will or will not believe in him, having chosen his people before the foundation of the world (see Ephesians 1), and that his selection is unbreakable and irresistible. If marriage is to mirror this principle, we believe that a woman has no right to select a husband for herself, but that she is to be chosen by a man and marriage is to be an unbreakable arrangement between the man and her father. Based on this reasoning, we have shunned a standard proposal and wedding ceremony, because if I had asked her to marry me (which I did not) then I would have given her the decision to marry me rather than selecting her and taking her myself. Furthermore, if we had exchanged conventional marriage vows, our union would have been based on X’s will and consent, which are not Biblical factors for marriage or salvation. Instead, I asked X’s father for his blessing in taking her hand in marriage. When he gave his blessing, X and I considered ourselves to be unbreakably betrothed in the sight of God. While we had initially intended to consummate our marriage after today’s symbolic ceremony, we instead did so secretly after private scripture reading, prayer, and mutual foot-washing.

Why does he even bother to say “we”, as in “we believe that a woman has no right to select a husband for herself”? It doesn’t matter what she thinks.

Advertise gods away

As an exercise, a couple of Australian advertising agencies were asked to make some ads advocating the banning of religion.

The bad news: Most didn’t even want to do it as an exercise. The show apparently did some previous ad games, for instance advocating euthanizing everyone over 80, and that was acceptable…but getting caught suggesting that religion was a bad thing? Uh-oh.

The good news: The judges. They didn’t bat an eye and all seemed to think it was a fine idea (well, except for the last guy, maybe).

I liked the first video better than the second, myself. I’m not a fan of this idea that religions cause the majority of warfare. I don’t think it’s true, and I don’t think you could even argue that religion has been the pretext for a majority of war. Wars have had too many causes.

Why you should never trust a priest in an argument

They’re devious. They’re like lawyers from hell. Michael Nugent notices some significant twists in the language from the Vatican.

The most significant sentence in the Vatican’s response to the Irish Government about the Cloyne Report comes on the second-last page, just before the concluding remarks. It says: “From the foregoing considerations, it should be clear that the Holy See expects the Irish Bishops to cooperate with the civil authorities, to implement fully the norms of canon law and to ensure the full and impartial application of the child safety norms of the Church in Ireland.”

This sounds reasonable on the face of it. But it conceals a vital distinction that the Catholic Church has already used to mislead people in Ireland on the same issue. Look again carefully at the wording: the Bishops should implement “fully” the norms of canon law, and ensure the “full and impartial” application of the Church’s child safety norms. Yet when it comes to cooperating with the civil authorities, as opposed to the internal rules of the Church, the important word “fully” is missing.

This missing word “fully” is the exact formulation that the Dublin Archdiocese used in 1997 to mislead people about its response to the sexual abuse of Marie Collins. When the priest who had abused Collins was convicted, the Archdiocese issued a press statement claiming that it had cooperated with police in relation to her complaint. Collins was upset by this and told her friend Father James Norman. Father Norman told police that he had asked the Archdiocese about the statement and the explanation he received was that “we never said we cooperated ‘fully’, placing emphasis on the word ‘fully’.”

It sounds nitpicky, but the Catholic church has a long history of crossing their fingers and holding them behind their back while making all kinds of sincere-sounding promises. Wait until you learn about “mental reservation”.

The Catholic Church practices a linguistic trick called ‘mental reservation’ by which “there may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be.” In some circumstances, of course, this may well be true. But not in the circumstance of responding to the rape and torture of children.

Misleading people is perfectly OK if you’re a Catholic priest, apparently.

War is peace, lies are truth

Thanks to Ophelia, I have been introduced to the Vision Forum, where fantasy is inconsequential and contradictions can be blissed over. Their Beautiful Girlhood Collection is something to see: it’s built on what they claim is a Biblical vision of femininity.

The Beautiful Girlhood Collection aspires, by the grace of God, to encourage the rebuilding of a culture of virtuous womanhood. In a world that frowns on femininity, that minimizes motherhood, and that belittles the beauty of being a true woman of God, we dare to believe that the biblical vision for girlhood is a glorious vision.

It is, in fact — a beautiful vision. It is a vision for purity and contentment, for faith and fortitude, for enthusiasm and industry, for heritage and home, and for joy and friendship. It is a vision so bright and so wonderful that it must be boldly proclaimed. We are here to proclaim it.

They’re selling a girl’s childhood built around the concept that servility is beauty: girls play with dolls and cook and clean. You really don’t want to look in their science section. I’d be blinded by the brilliance if it weren’t all so dark and dismal.

It’s a big lie everywhere: they’re dressing up a life of faceless hard labor in frilly dresses and calling it good. Everything is backwards.

Personifying it perfectly, when I first went to their web page, the image that popped up was this one.

Nothing says “hope” to a Christian quite like a row of burning bodies on stakes and a couple of hungry predators advancing on unarmed people. They do realize how these scenarios turned out, right? They ended with some slaves picking up the leftover gobbets of flesh and bone and stuffing ’em in a bucket, and raking fresh sand over the pools of blood. Hope!

My prayers go out to Detroit

You guys are about to be afflicted further. You’ve got a pack of idiots coming to town.

Lou Engle and Rick Joyner will be working together in September to promote The Call: Detroit, Engle’s prayer rally on November 11. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since both are closely involved in the New Apostolic Reformation, or the movement which believes that God is ordaining a new generation of prophets and apostles. Both have prophesied that America is turning into Nazi Germany and have claimed to know the reasons behind natural disasters, with Joyner calling Hurricane Katrina God’s judgment for homosexuality and Engle asserting that the Joplin, Missouri tornado was God’s punishment for legal abortion. Engle and Joyner, who leads MorningStar Ministries and The Oak Initiative, are also strong proponents of Seven Mountains Dominionism, which posits that fundamentalist Christians should take control over the seven most influential sectors of society: government, family, media, business, education, arts and entertainment, and the church.

If we’re turning into Nazi Germany (a Catholic and Lutheran regime), I know what kind of people are leading the crusade — the ones who propose taking over the government and turning it into a Dominionist tyranny, the ones who use natural disasters to demonize and dehumanize and discriminate against subsets of citizens.

Engle has said that The Call: Detroit will also focus on converting Muslims to Christianity along with the usual anti-choice and anti-gay efforts. Engle also released a new video publicizing the prayer rally:

Engle is certainly a vile creature. Anyone care to take any bets on whether the descent of these ghouls on Detroit will actually revitalize the city?

James Wood and the Magic Metaphor

Oh, not James Wood again. Wood is a literary critic who, like Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish, dislikes those darned New Atheists on the strange grounds that they criticize a religious belief that weirdly cloistered literature theorists cannot and will not understand. I’ve already covered the pretentious follies of Wood at some length, and I don’t feel like doing it again (especially since Wood’s primary writing talent seems to be noodling along academically at excessive length — ‘spare’ and ‘lucid’ are not terms that will ever be associated with his writing style), but I will at least mention his latest, tritely familiar effort. Once again, he accuses the New Atheists of attacking an irrelevant religion that doesn’t exist, via anecdotes. Like this one, which we could call the parable of the One True Christian.

I met the religious affairs journalist, who had for several years been a parish priest. During the course of our conversation, he asserted: “It is impossible to be a serious Christian and believe in heaven and hell.” When I, who was raised in a strongly and conventionally religious home, expressed surprise and suggested that once one stops believing in heaven one might as well stop believing in God, he said, more vehemently: “It’s exactly the opposite: not believing in heaven and hell is a prerequisite for serious Christian belief.” Trapped in the childhood literalism of my background, I had not entertained the possibility of Christian belief separated from the great lure and threat of heaven and hell.

[Read more…]

Pastor Mike has a plan

It is a familiar plan. It is the kind of plan that many totalitarian regimes would love to implement. Pastor Mike wants a list of all atheists.

Brothers and Sisters , I have been seriously considering forming a ( Christian ) grassroots type of organization to be named “The Christian National Registry of Atheists” or something similar . I mean , think about it . There are already National Registrys for convicted sex offenders , ex-convicts , terrorist cells , hate groups like the KKK , skinheads , radical Islamists , etc..

This type of “National Registry” would merely be for information purposes . To inform the public of KNOWN ( i.e., self-admitted) atheists . For example , let’s say you live in Colorado Springs , Colorado , you could simply scroll down ( from the I-Net site /Blog ) I would have , to the State of Colorado , and then when you see “Colorado Springs” , you will see the names of all the self-admitted atheist(s) who live there ( e.g., if an atheist’s name happened to be “Phil Small” ) . The individual’s physical address , and other known personal information would NOT be disclosed ( though , perhaps a photo could be ) .

Now , many (especially the atheists ) , may ask “Why do this , what’s the purpose ?” Duhhh , Mr. Atheist , for the same purpose many States put the names and photos of convicted sex offenders and other ex-felons on the I-Net – to INFORM the public ! I mean , in the City of Miramar , Florida , where I live , the population is approx. 109,000 . My family and I would sure like to know how many of those 109,000 are ADMITTED atheists ! Perhaps we may actually know some . In which case we could begin to witness to them and warn them of the dangers of atheism . Or perhaps they are radical atheists , whose hearts are as hard as Pharaoh’s , in that case , if they are business owners , we would encourage all our Christian friends , as well as the various churches and their congregations NOT to patronize them as we would only be “feeding” Satan .

Frankly , I don’t see why anyone would oppose this idea – including the atheists themselves ( unless of course , they’re actually ashamed of their atheist religion , and would prefer to stay in the ‘closet.’ ) .

Actually, there are good reasons to oppose it. It’s involuntary; many atheists promote the Out Campaign, and we think it would be great if more of us would step forward and of our own choice make our rejection of religion open. But many people also have good reasons to fear being outed, and the Pastor Mikes of the world are among them — he’s already threatening to harass atheists and organize boycotts. As you can see, he’s already comparing atheists to criminals, sex offenders, and the KKK…which is all rather ironic, given that his tactics are more like the oppressive and discriminatory actions of the Ku Klux Klan, who, by the way, would also probably love a list of known atheists in their neighborhoods.

I’m out. Pastor Mike can get to work compiling his own damn list, and he can put me right at the top of it. Would he also like me to get a tattoo, or maybe wear an armband with a big red A on it? We’re not ashamed, but many of us are rightly afraid of the cretinous thugs who follow Pastor Mike’s Jesus.

By the way, heres a little eytmological information you might find entertaining.

CRETIN. ORIGIN late 18th cent.: from French crétin, from Swiss French crestin ‘Christian’ (from Latin Christianus), here used to mean ‘human being’, apparently as a reminder that, though deformed, cretins were human and not beasts.

People like Pastor Mike do force us to work harder to remember that Christians can be human beings, not beasts.

Talking about the weather

I’d ask how all of you out East were holding up in the big storm, but apparently three million of you are without power and aren’t going to be able to read or reply for a while. When you do finally get back online, at least you’ll find this entertaining.

Fox News thought it would be clever to invite an atheist on, ask him what he was doing to prepare for the hurricane, and then sneer at his spiritual poverty. Unfortunately for them, they got David Silverman, who proceeded to show that the talk show hosts were cretins. Shrill, angry, obtuse cretins.

And if you really want to see more Fox News inanity, here’s an opinion piece in which a couple of thinktank troglodytes argue that we don’t really need a national weather service. Why? Because it’s sometimes wrong, because if it really was useful then private industry would provide the service, because it’s exploited for political purposes, and because it costs too much. It’s all bog-standard libertarian bullshit.

Weather is complicated and you’re never going to get perfect accuracy: the weather is always predicted with an awareness of the range of error possible. Commercial weather agencies rely on data from the wide range of federally established monitoring stations — not just locally, but internationally, at sea, and in space. The private agencies don’t actually want NWS/NOAA to end, they just want them to stop distributing their information to the public for free (amusingly, AccuWeather has tried to copyright forecasts taken verbatim from the National Weather Service).

The accusation that the NWS/NOAA service is used for political purposes is asserted without evidence, but I can guess what they’re talking about: Republicans and Libertarians hate the fact that there’s all this data pouring out of weather services that supports the fact of climate change. In their minds, reality is a conspiracy to undermine their ideology.

These pundits also expect their audience to be innumerate.

As it stands today, the public is forced to pay more than $1 billion per year for the NWS. With the federal deficit exceeding a trillion dollars, the NWS is easily overlooked, but it shouldn’t be.

Yes? So the cost of the National Weather Service is equal to less than 0.1% of the budget deficit?

These goons are only outdone by Ron Paul, who sees no virtue in forecasting and emergency response plans from agencies like FEMA: he thinks “We should be like 1900“. Hands off, just let people cope as well as they can in areas affected by natural disasters.

They could sit around and pray without federal assistance, after all.