Pat Robertson gets a difficult question: a man’s wife is suffering from Alzheimer’s. He thinks he ought to go find a new wife. Pat, what should he do?
Divorce her. She’s gone, so your marriage vows don’t apply any more. How sweet!
I’m going to have to have a talk with my wife, though: if I go senile in a few years, I don’t think I’d like to be thrown out of the house while she goes looking for a date, and so no taking advice from fundamentalist kooks.
(via Right Wing Watch.)
St. Xavier’s is an all-boys Catholic high school, and apparently they’re proud of it. In a game with a rival school, Colerain, the team started chanting about how their invisible man gave them an edge: “We’ve got Jesus!”. Ah, the arrogance of Christians…isn’t it nice that they think they get to deploy the Lord and Master of the Universe to assist them in football games?
The Colerain team responded effectively, I think. They chanted back, “We’ve got girls!”
I don’t care what the score was. Colerain wins.
My opinion of the rabbinical mind is plummeting downwards, thanks to the determined efforts of one man, Moshe Averick. We’ve encountered him before, and he was most unimpressive. Now he’s got a new line of criticism of atheists: we’re on a slippery slope. You know what comes next? What horrible abominable practice we’ll be endorsing?
Pedophilia!
Yeah, because without god’s laws to guide us, we will start running around raping little children willy-nilly. Never mind that atheists haven’t shown, as a whole, any such pattern or predilection, it’s just inevitable that we’ll want to abuse children. I think it’s a bizarre case of projection, again: really, I have no desire to have sex with small children, to rob banks, to rape dogs, or even to set churches on fire. You might as well suggest that without god I’ll become a NASCAR fan, start chewing tobacco, or vote Republican, all things I have no desire to do and which are not a product of theism or atheism.
I’m always baffled by this argument. What, there’s something about church or synagogue that suppresses your natural urge to rape, murder, and rob? But I feel no such urge without church!
And then, of course, he’s picked the very worst example. Nowadays, mention the word “pedophilia”, and nobody thinks of atheists — you know, even though pedophiles are a minority in their ranks, everyone considers “Catholic priest” virtually synonymous with “child-raper”. So much for religion suppressing those urges — it’s more like it attracts and enables monsters.
And then, having gnawed on one foot, Averick sticks the other one in.
A wise man once observed that while belief in God after the Holocaust may be difficult, belief in man after the Holocaust is impossible. The choices before us are clear: we will either seek a transcendent moral law to which we will all submit, or we will seek our own personal and societal indulgence. If we turn to God in our quest to create a moral and just world, we have a fighting chance; if not, we are doomed to spiral into the man-made hell of the human jungle.
Germany at the time of the Holocaust was a predominantly Catholic and Lutheran country. Hitler claimed to have a transcendant moral law, as well — that his people were the Chosen People, the best and greatest Volk, who by their intrinsic physical and moral and intellectual superiority were compelled to maintain their purity and exterminate the lesser races. That’s where you end up when you decree a source of absolute morality, a morality that isn’t based on equality and empathy and fairness, but on authority, especially the intangible untestable authority of an invisible magic ghost.
All moral laws are manmade. Do we recognize that reality and struggle to make them better as a community of reasonable human beings, or do we pretend that a few of us have special privileges and insight into the desires of a cosmic tyrant, and let them tell us how to live? Given that anyone claiming such authority is mad and delusional, I say no.
The Vision Forum is one of those backward organizations promoting a “biblical patriarchy” — they’re full of pious, patronizing claims about fathers raising daughters with good moral values, and it’s clearly all about tightly controlling women’s sexuality. A site called Rethinking Vision Forum is all about pointing out their hypocrisy and weirdness, and they have a recent post highlighting a biblical patriarchy CD. Take a look at the cover.
What is she doing? She’s reaching down to the man’s crotch; he’s looking down at what she’s doing; and creepiest of all, there’s a bearded older father figure watching sternly. And then, when you look at the original painting, you discover that it was intentionally photoshopped to put the woman into this suggestive position.
It’s supposed to be a “parable about the hearts of fathers and daughters”. I don’t think I want to know what the connection between the father-daughter relationship and voyeurism and public handjobs might be, but I suspect that no matter how twisted and kinky the interpretation, it’s probably got a biblical justification.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
