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?
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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
An accident at a fair in Indiana has killed five people. But the big news is that God saved a couple of country western singers from the duo Sugarland from risk!
Whatever it was, members of Sugarland can thank stage manager Hellen Rollens for saving their lives by making a spur-of-the-moment decision to hold a prayer circle just before the stage collapsed last Saturday at the Indiana State Fair.
Looks like God was listening. Here’s what happened.
Sugarland’s manager, Gail Gellman, credited Rollens with keeping the country pop duo from walking down the ramp at the last second, just as a 70 mph gust of wind from an approaching storm caused the stage to topple over onto the crowd, killing five fans and injuring dozens of others.
“Everybody was standing in a prayer circle getting ready to go onstage, and [as Rollens] was walking down the ramp, the stage fell. So her decision to hold them for literally a minute saved every band member and crew’s life,” Gellman told the Associated Press.
Actually, don’t you suspect that this Rollens character frequently asks the band to waste time in prayer circles, so this was nothing exceptional? Wouldn’t it have been more impressive if God had spoken in warning to Hellen Rollens, so that she’d run out to warn everyone else and tell them to get away from danger, so that 5 people wouldn’t be dead?
Since this God is clearly an evil bastard who cares nothing for human life, and since the members of Sugarland must be agents of an evil, monstrous being who casually swats down their fans, I hope you’ll all join me in boycotting the insensitive wicked minions of this cruel god. Boycott Sugarland!*
*This is admittedly no sacrifice on my part since I’ve never heard of these dull-witted wankers before, and just the phrase “country pop duo” sends me fleeing.
New Bethany. New Beginnings. Rebekah Home for Girls. Hephzibah House. Second Chance Ranch. Rachel Academy. Circle of Hope Girls Ranch. These are all places that claim to offer succor to parents of ‘troubled teens’, safe houses where they can send their kids for discipline and loving assistance to overcome whatever has made them rowdy or morose or obstinate or disobedient, all those symptoms of independence, and turn them into cheerful, cooperative, socialized citizens of community conventionality. They all rely heavily on the appeal of Christianity, and their names resonate with biblical themes…when hearing invocations of Jesus to draw children out to isolated camps ought instead to fill everyone with the same sense of dread that hearing the Jaws theme music ought to do.
Predictably, these fly-by-night camps run by Jesus freaks all turn out to be hellholes.
It’s like every time I go to Europe, it’s the same two or three Muslims waiting to greet me. There they were in Dublin, Hamza Tzortzis and his crew, and now I come to Oslo, and there they are, the same Muslims parked outside the Humanist Congress (Google translation).
Islam Net believes Congress is based on “the erroneous assumption that humanism is the way forward for humanity.” Islam Net and its affiliates are not surprisingly more faith in Islam as the way forward.
– Islam is a world view that is not only sensible, but the basis for our values and morals, said the press release.
That’s all nonsense, of course: Islam is a primitive religion with a violent history, and like all those Abrahamic faiths, is all about praising a non-existent patriarchal deity. Islam is the past, atheism and humanism are the future. And if Islam is the basis for our morality, why is the Islamic world such a hellhole of barbarity and opression? (I’d also flip that around and ask, if Christianity is such a moral and righteous faith, why are American Christians so fervent about making the rubble bounce in their bombings of Islamic countries?)
I have no problem with the Muslims putting up their information booth outside the congress. However, what really annoyed me about them was that they were quite dedicated in intruding on the discussion on twitter, using the congress hashtag #humanist2011 freely while not actually attending the congress. We were getting constant exhortations to come out and visit their booth, and they were positively manic in raving about some survivor of the Utoya killings who was a convert to Islam, which was widely considered to be extremely tasteless and inappropriate.
They also got rather frantic when the twitter conversation was about Taslima Nasreen’s talk — you want to annoy an Islamist? Just let a Muslim woman speak. I looked into a few of the angry Islamist tweets: new accounts with almost no history, created just to spam the conference. Bad show, very bad show. They made no new friends with their behavior.
As a follow-up to his video of 100 atheists, Jonathan Pararajasingham has collected 20 believing academics explaining their position. Your brain will hurt.
Jerry Coyne has posted brief summaries of all 20, but you’ve got to listen to it all. The point isn’t their answers, which are all non-answers and babbling, but the stark raving incoherence and inconsistency of their attempts to explain themselves.
