The power of faith

It’s amazing what religion can do. In this case, it motivated some dim old fart who ought to have been loafing about watching Glenn Beck and drowning his anger with a six-pack of Bud to go out and try to murder gynecologists. He didn’t actually succeed, fortunately: he was playing with his gun in his cheap room at the Motel 6 when it went off and sent a bullet flying into the room next door…so bad-ass that he is, he called up the front desk to mention that he was worried he might have hit someone else.

Then the police came and found out what he was really up to. He didn’t want to accidentally shoot someone, but he definitely intended to march into Planned Parenthood and murder as many people as he could.

Ralph Lang, 63, told a Madison police officer at the Motel 6, 1754 Thierer Road, that he had a gun “to lay out abortionists because they are killing babies,” according to a criminal complaint filed Thursday in U.S. District Court.

Lang said he planned on shooting the clinic’s doctor “right in the head,” according to the complaint. Asked if he planned to shoot just the doctor or nurses, too, Lang replied he wished he “could line them up all in a row, get a machine gun, and mow them all down,” the complaint said.

And he’s proudly confessing all this to the police! These religious excuses do attract the dumb ones, that’s for sure. And yes, he had a vague plan to go on a nationwide shooting spree, and he was driven by his religion.

Sgt. Bernie Gonzalez looked around Lang’s motel room and saw a box that contained several documents, including a map of the U.S. with dots in each state and the handwritten words “some abortion centers.”

Also written on the map was “Blessed Virgin Mary says Hell awaits any woman having an abortion.”

I think someone needs to lock up Ol’ Grandpa Gunman in a nice institution somewhere with a chapel and an absence of firearms and a multituded of locks on the doors, for the safety of society.

Stay classy, Kirk!

I missed the classiest part of Kirk Cameron’s remarks about Stephen Hawking — the source I cited apparently edited out the over-the-top preliminaries as words that should not be witnessed. We don’t exhibit such decorum here, so I’m willing to repeat what Cameron said.

To say anything negative about Stephen Hawking is like bullying a blind man. He has an unfair disadvantage, and that gives him a free pass on some of his absurd ideas.

Oooh, he went there. So the only reason physicists pay attention to Hawking is out of pity? Kirk Cameron is so far out of touch, and such a boorish asshole.

Women! It’s your job to prepare for your rape!

Kansas representative Pete DeGraaf is fighting for a bill that would exclude abortion coverage in cases of rape. He thinks the state should stay out of that problem, and it should just be something that women “plan ahead for”:

Bollier asked him, “And so women need to plan ahead for issues that they have no control over with pregnancy?”

DeGraaf drew groans of protest from some House members when he responded, “I have a spare tire on my car.”

“I also have life insurance,” he added. “I have a lot of things that I plan ahead for.”

You heard the man, ladies. You should all just get organized and make plans now for the aftermath of your rape. Maybe set up a cookie jar in the kitchen and tuck a dollar bill in it now and then, as your rainy day rape abortion fund. Your supportive boy friends and spouses can cheerfully contribute, too, and if you’re a member of a lesbian couple, you could have a matching pair (for cute!). Get one for your daughters, too, and start them on saving a little bit every year — after all, young girls get raped, too, so you might as well make it a regular feature of their lives.

By the way, the compassionate Pete DeGraaf is also an associate pastor. I am not surprised.

Wrong, root and branch; wrong at every cell and molecule; wrong to the core

The world didn’t end last Saturday (obviously), but Harold Camping and his predictions are just a smokescreen, and everyone is missing the heart of the problem.

Camping has now spoken. He now claims that Jesus did arrive ‘spiritually’ on the 21st, and that in his generous mercy, God has decided to spare us the 153 days of the tribulation, but that the world will still be ending on 21 October. This is no surprise. This is exactly what these crackpot prophets do: they’re never right, but they are great at rationalizing.

His followers are busy readjusting. Here’s a radio interview with one bible-thumper; the guy who threw away his life savings on subway signs was left wandering in Times Square, confused and disappointed. None of them has changed their beliefs about the biblical apocalypse, they’re just fudging the dates.

The Family Radio website has been scrubbed clean of mentions of Judgment Day.

And what do I see from most people? A stern finger-wagging with biblical authority reaffirmed.

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I was sent that image by someone who clearly thought it was a joke, but I am not laughing. I’m angry, instead. I don’t fucking care what fucking Jesus fucking said. The problem is NOT that some kook in California plucked numbers out of the Bible and conjured up a numerological justification for a date: the idiocy runs much deeper than that.

  • The entire myth of dispensationalism — that time is divided into distinct ages with discrete beginnings and ends, characterized by distinct bodies of knowledge granted us by divine will — is nonsense. These fairy tales of a rapture and tribulation and world destruction are entirely the invention of crank theologians elaborating on the ravings of the 19th century Irish priest, John Nelson Darby. It’s no more sourced or historical or rational than the goddamn Book of Mormon.

  • Christian eschatology is a vile and hateful message about their imaginary tyrant god who, once again, is scheduled to have a temper tantrum in which he kills almost everyone, snatches up their souls, and makes them suffer for eternity for being human. A few will be spared; their reward is an eternity of servility, but at least they get to know they’re better than everyone else. And that’s the real lesson here: it’s all about elitism and the most extreme threats imaginable to anyone who does not support these self-appointed masters of dogma. Again, there’s no reason to believe any of it, other than that people have absorbed the propaganda for the whole of their lifetime.

  • The Christian bible is supposed to be the ultimate source of authority, and to many of the more extreme, the only source of authority. It’s got ‘bible codes’ in it; it’s a rich vein of numerological bullshit to be mined; it’s vagued, confused, ambiguous, and contradictory, a refuse heap of tribal gobbledygook hallowed by nothing other than long ages of accumulation. Our minds try desperately to find pattern and meaning in what we observe around us, and the best source to trigger all kinds of lunatic pattern generating theories is a nearly totally incoherent mass of text with huge cultural signposts pointing at it and screaming that it is important.

    It’s like being told that a tangled, confusing clump of jungle, all bewildering with shadow and random shapes slashing across it, is the home of a fierce tiger that will kill you if you get close. Stare hard at it, and you can convince yourself that there is something dangerous lurking there, even if it contains no animal larger than a rabbit.

Sure, everyone is laughing at Harold Camping now, except his followers, who are undeterred. But you’re missing the real joke. Look at every Abrahamic religion, with their myths of prophets and favored peoples and fate. Look at the crazy conservative church in your town, that preaches homophobia and anti-science and supports Israel because of the Armageddon prophecy. Look at the liberal Christian church down the street from you that has the nice Vacation Bible School and puts on happy plays for the older kids, and also teaches that one day you will stand before a great god and be judged. Look at your family members who blithely believe in death as a mini-apocalypse, in which they will be magically translated into another realm, again to be judged.

It’s the very same rot, the poison of religion that twists minds away from reality and fastens them on hellish bogeymen. They’re demented fuckwits, every one, and the big lie rests right on the fundamental beliefs of supernaturalism and deities, not on the ephemera of one crank’s bizarre interpretations.

And to the next person who quotes Matthew 24:36 at me: you’re part of the problem, too.

How not to argue with Hawking

Man, I am so jealous. I say stuff like this all the time, but all Stephen Hawking has to do is plainly state the obvious that “There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark,” and it’s NEWS. I think half the email I got this morning was all about people reacting to that one simple comment.

This one was promising: Michael Wenham objects, and one point he makes is fair enough. He says he isn’t afraid of the dark, which I’m willing to accept — he would know best what scares him. But then, like all the critics, he announces that he has evidence! Yes! Just what I’m looking for!

Strangely enough, my theory that there is a form of life after we die is not some sort of wishful thinking. It’s based on evidence. If the brain is a computer, then, when I was studying where Stephen Hawking now teaches, I came on a mass of data of which the most convincing, the neatest, explanation was that death is not the end of life.

Data? For life after death? I was anticipating something pathetic, like near-death experiences, but wouldn’t you know it, Mr Wenham comes up with “evidence” that is even more pitiful.

His evidence for an afterlife is…Jesus.

It wasn’t the most comfortable nor most obvious of conclusions, but the forensic case was forceful and beautiful, providing “simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations”. The best exposition I found was by the then director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London, Professor Sir Norman Anderson, in The Evidence for the Resurrection (later republished as part of Jesus Christ: The Witness of History). My disturbing conclusion was that, if it happened once, as seemed beyond reasonable doubt, then I needed to revise my whole world view. What you see is not all you get.

Uh, yeah.

Then the new Thor movie is evidence for Valhalla, the Cottingley Fairies are evidence for sprites, pixies, and elves, and the ruins of Troy speak for the reality of the Greek pantheon.

What’s wrong with the media, in one paragraph

The Atlantic runs this regular column where they ask people about their reading habits — this time, they asked Aaron Sorkin, who sneers at the web and announces that he reads a couple of newspapers…or at least, he reads the front page and the op-eds in a couple of newspapers.

When I read the Times or The Wall Street Journal, I know those reporters had to have cleared a very high bar to get the jobs they have. When I read a blog piece from “BobsThoughts.com,” Bob could be the most qualified guy in the world but I have no way of knowing that because all he had to do to get his job was set up a website–something my 10-year-old daughter has been doing for 3 years. When The Times or The Journal get it wrong they have a lot of people to answer to. When Bob gets it wrong there are no immediate consequences for Bob except his wrong information is in the water supply now so there are consequences for us.

“A very high bar”…who? David Brooks, Tom Friedman, or perhaps he is referring to Ross Douthat? With the exception of Paul Krugman, the only bar you have to clear is to be smug, rich, and obscenely privileged. And don’t get me started on the WSJ opinion pages — there, you have clear the hurdle of being so far to the right you risk being a Nazi.

This is the problem, that people blithely assume that because it is in the NY Times or the WSJ that it must be right — I’d rather read BobsThoughts.com because there, at least, poor lonely Bob must rely on the quality of his arguments rather than the prestige of his name and affiliation to persuade.

I’ll also add that when Bob throws the wrong information into the “water supply”, he’s only contaminating his own well; when Brooks or Friedman do it, they’re soaking the whole nation. And if Sorkin thinks that having a position on a big name newspaper means you’re exempt from the problem of bad information, then he’s dumber than his writing makes him sound. It was the Times and the Journal that pounded the drums of war, and fed conspiracy theories about the Clintons, to name just a few examples.

At least Bob’s opinions didn’t result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

Evolution is a Jewish conspiracy

The essay starts off stupidly enough.

In 1867 Karl Marx dedicated DasKapital to Charles Darwin.

Actually, no, he didn’t. It’s a fairly common lie in creationist circles, though, just like the others sprinkled throughout the story.

Modern creation science is led by an array of top-flight Ph.D. scientists, including biochemists, paleontologists, astronomers and geologists. It presents a formidable battery of evidence now knocking hundreds of holes in traditional evolutionary arguments. As never before, scientific creationism debunks the contrived “evidence” that evolutionary theory has fed on since Darwin.

No, it isn’t. Creation science is led by a gang of ignorant clods who can’t read a paper without mangling it.

But OK, so far this is just your standard modus operandi for creationists. The really weird stuff is shouted out in the title: JEWISH SUPREMACISTS USE EVOLUTION TO CORRUPT MANKIND. Did you know that evolution is a Jewish conspiracy to corrupt Western civilization?

Why doesn’t the scientific community abandon Darwin’s failed hypotheses? Simple: The Jewish-dominated media and educational establishment are determined that, like unconditional support of Israel, Holocaust mythology, hate laws, and “civil rights” favoritism, there will be no end to the relentless force-feeding of evolution. Belief in evolution is a prerequisite for Jewish supremacism’s new-world order.

Yet anti-Zionist leadership on the right remains oblivious to the fact that evolution is the largest, ugliest, most aggressive tentacle of the Jewish revolutionary octopus. Anti-Zionists are often evolutionists, claiming that Jews evolved in a way that makes them inherently degenerate, subversive, and corruptive. They make the most Luciferian, dehumanizing fable ever invented by pseudo-science into a pillar of their thinking!

The Reverend Ted Pike is kind of obsessed with Jews. They’re behind everything.

You see, the degenerate Jews promote evolution, which led the Nazis to kill Jews, and we must organize resistance to the Jewish agenda and the Judaic threat, and we absolutely must support Israel without question. Every paragraph drips with anti-semitic bigotry, but at the same time he rants against the wicked anti-Zionists.

I’ve seen this often in fundamentalist Christians. Jews aren’t really people; they’re just props in the script of their eschatology. We have to keep them around because the True Final Solution is for Jesus to exterminate most of them and convert the survivors, and if we jump the gun and kill them all now, why, that would invalidate the Bible, which would be wicked.

The problem we face today originates in Jewish rebellion to Christ. It is primarily a moral issue which cannot be addressed by dehumanizing Jews or violence. It must be met with reason and persuasion, even love. The Bible presents Jewish apostasy as part of a long-range scenario that will ultimately result in anti-Christ world rule but also redemption of a remnant of Jews out of great tribulation at Christ’s second coming. The problem of Jewish supremacism ultimately is Christ’s problem, to be resolved by Him, not military or persecutive measures.

This is why Adolf Hitler and the Nazis must be damned. Not because they killed people, but because they lead us into “anti-biblical, evolutionary, racist errors”. We must support Israel because it’s a kind of holding pen for the Jews, where they will be annihilated in Armageddon, and you’re a bad, bad person if you begin the slaughter prematurely.

Despite the fact that I don’t have any evidence of any Jewish background in my lineage, I do have to cop to being an ugly evolutionary tentacle, and there are most certainly Jews in my readership. Does it make you feel all warm and happy and safe to peek into the minds of some of the most ardent Christian supporters of Israel?

Focus on the Fallacy

Oy, this will make your head hurt…mainly because you won’t be able to handle the degree of stupidity involved in this argument. This is a video from Focus on the Patriarchy that makes an analogy: gay marriage is as unnatural and impossible as gravity pushing objects upward, and trying to claim that trying to legislate equality is as silly as trying to legislate the behavior of objects in a gravitational field.

And this is from an organization that has tried to legislate creationism into truth.

(via Jen)

There goes the Florida tourism industry

The Florida legislature has just banned sex.

An act relating to sexual activities involving animals; creating s. 828.126, F.S.; providing definitions; prohibiting knowing sexual conduct or sexual contact with an animal; prohibiting specified related activities; providing penalties; providing that the act does not apply to certain husbandry, conformation judging, and veterinary practices; providing an effective date.

At least there are a few loopholes. “It’s alright, officer, she’s judging my conformation and I’m studying for the NAVLE!”

Also, Disneyworld won’t care. They suck the sex right out of everything, anyway.