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.

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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.

Keeping score in Boston

Ugh. The Archdiocese of Boston keeps a public list of accused and convicted pedophiles for your viewing ‘pleasure’. It’s a l o n g list.

It’s also disturbing that the two most common penalties are “Assigned to a Life of Prayer and Penance” and “Laicized”. If you’re a priest aren’t you expected to do the former anyway, and wouldn’t being kicked out of the priesthood be a reward?

No weirder than any other religious story

That Jesus guy sure got around. This is a sign in Shingo, Japan, where they claim that Jesus settled down after escaping crucifixion.

Here’s the story:

When Jesus Christ was 21 years old, he came to Japan and pursued knowledge of divinity for 12 years. He went back to Judea at age 33 and engaged in his mission. However, at that time, people in Judea would not accept Christ’s preaching. Instead, they arrested him and tried to crucify him on a cross. His younger brother, Isukiri casually took Christ’s place and ended his life on the cross.

Christ, who escaped the crucifixion, went through the ups and downs of travel, and again came to Japan. He settled right here in what is now called Herai Village, and died at the age of 106.

On this holy ground, there is dedicated a burial mound on the right to deify Christ, and a grave on the left to deify Isukiri.

The above description was given in a testament by Jesus Christ.

I like how Isukiri “casually” let himself be tortured to death.

I also wonder if the people of Shingo intentionally put up the sign to screw with Mormon missionary heads.

A very sad story

What does this religious puritanism do to people? It screws up their lives with needless guilt. This is a kind of oppression of the mind, where women are inculcated with unrealistic and shameful views of their own bodies.

Mental purity is a state of mind Renaud came to after years of struggle. When she was 10, she discovered a dirty magazine in her older brother’s bathroom. She had never seen male genitalia before; she became increasingly curious and began to search for pornography. When she hit puberty, she says, her curiosity turned into compulsion, and she added masturbation to her porn-seeking behavior. At 15, she attended a Christian summer camp and heard the pastor talking about “a Father in heaven who loves you unconditionally regardless of what you do.” From then on, she became active in the church and vowed to end her masturbation and porn habits.

“I’ve been sober for seven years now,” she says of her masturbation-free life.

Although some married women participate in Dirty Girls Ministries, Renaud’s crusade is largely for single women like herself. The majority of Dirty Girls’ members are in their 20s and 30s, but many teenagers and preteen girls, some as young as 11, have also joined. Technically speaking, most are virgins, but because of their below-the-belt explorations, they report feeling tainted, undesirable, and perverted.

Being orgasm-free is not the same as being sober, and masturbation does not make someone tainted or undesirable. There are, of course, extreme cases of sexual obsession where the behavior can interfere with day-to-day, productive living, but that isn’t the case in this story: this “Dirty Girls Ministries” regards masturbating or even reading a romance novel twice a week as a dangerous case of excessive addiction. Given that attitude, I suspect they’d regard the Pharyngula readership as a nest of decadent, pervy wastrels obsessed with sex. You should be proud.

But the reverse is true: having a fairly casual attitude towards sex — it doesn’t define you, and your worth is not a function of abstinence — is healthy, and this weirdly repressed perspective inflicts unforgivable pain on ordinary human beings.

Indeed, guilt and shame are emotions commonly expressed by the women involved in Dirty Girls Ministries. “Once I’ve actually committed the sin (of porn and masturbation), I find myself feeling such sadness, frustration, disappointment, anger, shame,” writes one anonymous commenter on the Ministries’ forum. “It makes me feel sick and unworthy,” writes another. One girl even reported feeling guilty after simply dreaming about masturbating.

Isn’t that just the most wonderful thing about religion? Once you’ve infected someone with it, it’s incredibly easy to put them to work punishing themselves for you.

You’ve got a choice. Either you accept the artificial guilt of an ancient dogma and stop doing a perfectly normal, harmless, and universal behavior, or you stop accepting the guilt and find human happiness in being who you are. Rational people choose the latter. Deluded people follow the former, and suffer lifelong for it.

(via Skepchick)

Prager persuades? Really?

GilDodgen, one of the lead IDiots at Uncommon Descent, recently posted about how he used to be an atheist and was then converted to Christianity — sound familiar? I think atheists must really be underrepresented in the census, because apparently every Christian larva must go through a multi-year developmental stage of intense atheism, by their account. Anyway, he talks about what persuaded him that there is a god, and it was…Dennis Prager. Seriously? I’ve heard Prager, I’ve read his articles, he’s a simpering godbot, and I can’t imagine anyone who attaches the slightest importance to evidence based reasoning being persuaded by that guy.

Two things: first, here’s one of the videos by Prager that Dodgen claims converted him. It’s titled “The most important verse in the Bible” — yeah, that sounds like something that would suck an atheist right in.

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Archaic religion + modern technology → horror in Bolivia

We think of Mennonites as an extremely conservative Christian sect that is cautious about adopting modern technology. But apparently, with the right incentive, they can innovate, as a group of Bolivian Mennonites demonstrate.

Wall is among 130 women and girls of the Mennonite colony in Manitoba Colony, who claim that from 2005 to ’09, the same cloudy horror visited them. They’re the victims of what is allegedly one of the ugliest sex scandals in the history of the Mennonites, a pacifist Christian Anabaptist denomination founded in Europe in the 1500s, if not Bolivia and South America. In a criminal trial now under way in nearby Santa Cruz, Peter Weiber, 48, a Mennonite veterinarian, is accused of transforming a chemical meant to anesthetize cows into a spray to be used on humans. For four years, Weiber and eight other Mennonite men allegedly sprayed the chemical through bedroom windows in Manitoba at night, sedating entire families and raping the females.

Charming fellows. Old-timey farmers. Quaint horse-drawn buggies. Insular, inbred, arrogant patriarchal monsters.

The accused didn’t just commit horrible acts, but don’t seem to feel guilt or remorse.

The men range in ages from 20 to 48. Four of them, including Weiber, are married. But they don’t seem to take the case too seriously: they often joke with guards or fall asleep during trial proceedings, and during one victim’s testimony the judge had to reprimand them for laughing and making faces. That may be one reason victims rarely go to the courthouse. “My heart was racing and my head hurt,” Susana Banman, 55, tells TIME about her one day at the trial.

Suddenly, I don’t find myself as distressed at the thought of the imminent potential extinction of humanity by ecological disaster as I once was. So that’s a bit of good news.

(via Jen)

Mortification of mind and flesh

This is the story of Lydia Schatz, a 7 year old girl in a good Christian home, tortured and beaten to death in the name of God.

Her parents were stupid people, following the parenting advice of a pair of demented fuckwits, Mike and Debi Pearl. The Pearls are popular and prospering because they have a ministry and a collection of books that appeal to a popular strain of fundamentalist Christian thought: the need to control. They see the family as a reflection of their imaginary god, patriarchal, ruled, dominated, and advocate a policy of discipline that echoes what they think their god desires.

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