God has already told Pat Robertson who the next president is going to be.
Man, god sure gives ol’ Pat remarkably long and detailed messages.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
God has already told Pat Robertson who the next president is going to be.
Man, god sure gives ol’ Pat remarkably long and detailed messages.
I guess R. Joseph Hoffman is trolling for attention again. Joey — or is it Joe? Joseph seems so fussy. Maybe R.? — R., then, is so disappointed in those dissolute insult-mongering New Atheists that he has scribbled up another sloppy, incoherent, lazy whine in which engages in prolonged insult-mongering, nothing more. It’s an astonishing demonstration of projection and an absolute lack of self-awareness: the post is little more than a clumsy list of the atheists who piss off R., with bombastic, affected explanations for why they are so stupid. It’s a rather useful guide, though, to who’s cool in the atheist movement; I’m flattered that he despises me so, and included me in the list.
Here’s R.’s list, with his tumid awkward insults pared down to a single summary sentence:
Dawkins: Unabashed science-thumper.
Dennett: Sloppy.
Harris: Singularly incoherent.
Hitchens: The only true intellectual of the group.
Headlights:
Coyne: How can he be such a scientist when the U of Chicago has one of the most venerable divinity schools in the country?
Myers: Moral nihilist who once destroyed a cracker.
Sidelights:
Christina: Radical feminist and lesbian who sees everything as a weird sexual joke.
Benson: Runs a chat room for neo-atheist spleen.
MacDonald: Another horn in the bagpipe blown by Coyne and Myers.
Rosenhouse: Doesn’t like anything that rises an inch beyond cultural Judaism.
Now you know who to turn to for the intelligent and interesting commentary on religion. Keep in mind, though, that R. is a brilliant fellow who thinks Dawkins’ entire argument was devastated by this Terry Eagleton quote:
“What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace, or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?”
The knob-polishers and filigree-painters of religion and theology are not at all relevant to the fundamental question of whether a god exists or not — but they make useful distractions for the pompous, pretentious buffoons who try to hide the fact that there is no elephant in the room with learned discussions about what color he paints his toenails.
Good god, media, I DON’T CARE ABOUT IOWA ANY MORE. It’s a freakish little local contest dominated by hardcore fanatics, and the only reason the results will mean anything is that the media will do its best to pump up the outcome into a portent of things to come. So when I saw this headline in the Minneapolis Star Tribune at the coffee shop today, I just set it aside, disgusted, disinterested, and disenchanted.
Bachmann isn’t going to win. Even if she did, she’s one lunatic among a field of demented dwarfs.
What headline next, Strib? “SARAH PALIN: STILL IRRELEVANT”? How about “JOHN MCCAIN AIN’T DEAD YET” or “SASQUATCH PROBABLY WON’T WIN REPUBLICAN NOMINATION”?
I’m ready to call for a return of party bosses in smoke-filled rooms; this obsession with turning politics into a horse race, with every news source fussing over percentage points, is making a joke of democracy.
The only “points” we should be discussing are the substance of their policies.
Some random troll on the internet named Simon Painter has tried to invent an ejection seat for arguments.
I am staking a claim to this as Painter’s Law of The Internet whereby someone occupying an indefensible position will call troll to avoid admitting they made an illogical statement.
See? All he has to do is be repetitive and stupid and pointless, and when someone accurately calls him a troll, he gets to declare victory! It’s going to be amusing when someone named Painter starts trying to win arguments by citing Painter’s Law.
But here’s where it gets really funny: in that very same article, Simon Painter does a far better job of defining a troll than most people.
Personally I have no real interest in who is right and who is wrong. It makes about as much difference to my life as the existence or not of the Higgs-Boson particle. I will almost certainly never know for sure and I am truly skeptical that it would make much of a difference to my life either way. If you follow the Roman Catholic Church or some other variation on the theme or you follow the Church of ‘Atheism’ and worship the prophet Dawkins I couldn’t really care a monkeys but when you start making stupid statements like ‘there is no god’ or you judge an organisation that comforts many by the evils of a few within that organisation then you should probably prepare to be called out on it.
If you don’t care which position is right or wrong but you still charge in to stir the shit, you are a troll. And if you’re so oblivious that you publicly announce that you don’t give a damn about the truth, you’re a moron and a troll.
Jesse Bering is that weird evolutionary psychologist who writes for SciAm and who I’ve criticized before. It seems he doesn’t like me at all (boy, does he hate me—it’s extremely personal for him), and I’ll be charitable and assume his personal antipathy has clouded his judgment, because he’s really gone on a frothing tear on facebook and made a few strange accusations. Apparently, I have a choice: I can be sexually attracted to my students, or I’m sick and need to see a doctor. And then he and his friends proceed to carry out a remote dissection of my psychological problems. On facebook. By a bunch of people who’ve never even met me. How…unprofessional.
I was sent a copy of the thread; if you’d like to read bizarre internet drama completely disconnected from reality, you’ll find it below the fold.
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.
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.
Jake Finkbonner was in big trouble: a minor injury led to necrotizing fascitis, and the bacteria chewed up his face, head, and neck in a horrible life-threatening infection. Fortunately, the family placed a relic from a 17th century Native American convert to Catholicism named Tekakwitha on his pillow (it is not clear whether it was a chunk of Tekakwitha’s bones, or one of these lockets, which you can buy for $19.99), and he got better! A miracle!
Now they’re planning to canonize Tekakwitha.
On Monday, the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI formally recognized the miracle attributed to Tekakwitha – the last step on her way to canonization.
Tekakwitha, known as “the Lily of the Mohawks,” was born in 1656 in upstate New York to a Mohawk chief and an Algonquin mother. A smallpox epidemic killed both her parents and left her with partial blindness and a disfigured face. She converted to Catholicism after meeting several priests. Ostracized from her tribal community, Tekakwitha devoted herself to a life of deep prayer. She died in 1680 at age 24. According to the Catholic Church, witnesses said that within minutes of her death, the scars from smallpox completely vanished and her once-disfigured face suddenly shone with radiant beauty.
Oh, I forgot to mention…in addition to the magic locket, Jake spent 9 weeks in a modern hospital, received major surgeries to extirpate the infected tissue, massive doses of antibiotics, and apparently substantial cosmetic surgery. If only St Tekakwitha had been able to get the same, instead of relying entirely on Catholic hoodoo — maybe she wouldn’t have died at 24.
Oh, and there’s a poll. It’s got over 60,000 votes on it already, so I doubt we’ll be able to budge it much, but you can take a stab at it anyway.
86.9% Yes
9.5% No
3.6%Not sure
“Do you believe in modern medicine?” would have been a better question. They never ask that one, though.
I do have to say I’m much more impressed with Jake Finkbonner. Here’s what he had to say about it:
There’s been a lot of media around me lately especially with the announcement of Blessed Kateri becoming a Saint based on my story. Please don’t confuse the issue which is that my survival is a miracle. We thank the doctors at Children’s Hospital for all that they did to save my life. I wouldn’t be here without them. I also thank all the people that prayed for me. Obviously, God heard their prayers. This decision to canonize Blessed Kateri is something that the Vatican and the Pope declared, not us. Although we are a part of this story, we did not have any influence on this decision. Congratulations to the Catholic Church and the Native American culture in the canonizing of the now Saint Kateri.
He seems like a gracious and sensible young man.
I boggled at the pettiness and stupidity of the Until Abortion Ends campaign. It’s a collection of videos by people who have promised to give something up ‘until abortion ends’.
I have two problems with the whole premise.
Abortion can never end, short of establishing a theocratic tyranny with no privacy and absolute control of the population. Even when abortion was illegal, abortions still happened in back alley clinics, and with far greater loss of life. And then, of course, it would be inexcusably immoral to end abortion for cases where the mother’s life was at risk. These people haven’t thought it through.
The sacrifices the participants make are embarrassingly petty. Most promise to stop drinking soda pop until abortion ends; one swears off Taco Bell; others give up coffee. Yeah, like I’m going to be persuaded to take away women’s right to choose because Billy Joe Bob in Augusta, Georgia is pinin’ for a Coke, or Betty Rae in Provo, Utah has been deprived of her french fries for far too long.
This silly effort is never going to work. I suggest stepping it up a notch: everyone who doesn’t like abortion should threaten to hold their breath until they turn blue if women don’t stop needing abortions.
Ophelia has found a live one: a Christian zealot happily anticipating Christopher Hitchens’ deathbed conversion. He also claims to have diagnosed Hitchens’ cancer when he briefly met him months before his real diagnosis, which makes me wonder why the bastard didn’t take him aside and let him know.
Since Ophelia has dealt with him with a more than adequate curl of the lip, I’ll just mention one paragraph that annoyed me immensely.
I wouldn’t tell Christopher Hitchens that now is the time to get right with the Lord, or to pray or read the Bible. I wouldn’t try and convince him of the resurrection. I would only ask him to entertain the notion that love — the love he has for his life, his wife and his children, the love his readers have for him and the love that the doctors and nurses are showing him — is a real thing whose origins are worth exploring without glibness (sorry, saying “love for your fellow mammals” doesn’t require religion, as Hitchens did once, doesn’t cut it). It also can be done without Christophobia. I know that my discovery that I had cancer focused my mind on discovering the true nature of things, and I’m not talking about wishful thinking.
There’s practically nothing more supercilious and obnoxiously sanctimonious than a Christian deciding to lecture an unbeliever on love…because these prissy assholes all believe they have a monopoly on the One True Love™, which is servile obedience to a domineering tyrant. I trust that Hitchens knows love just as well as I do, and there’s nothing of gods in it — it’s between people, dammit, not fantasies. That is the way it always has been, and to taint it with the nonsense of religion and the slimy author’s submission to an imaginary lord is to diminish the reality.
Oh, the “true nature of things” on which the author, Mark Judge, focused after being diagnosed with cancer himself? Catholicism, that stodgy humbug and haven of horrible old men who think they’ve found love in the rape of children, that citadel of cowards who retreat from reality to find meaning in the dust and lies of antique theology.
