More kids gunned down by an assault rifle just last night.
Two adults and three children were killed in a shooting involving what police said appeared to be an assault rifle in Albuquerque’s South Valley on Saturday night.
If only Wayne LaPierre had been there to train the shooters in gun safety! If only even one of those kids had a Glock!
I’ve been reading Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
It’s painful. Hubbard was so clearly delusional and so malevolently manipulative that you find it hard to believe people actually do fall for this nonsense, and fall for it hard. People put up with shocking abuse for years, decades even, all the while apologizing for their behavior, making excuses for the church, and even voluntarily submitting to the most degrading punishments. For instance, Scientology maintains something called the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF), which is little more than confinement and humiliation. People who question the dogma or annoy David Miscavage (the head of the religion now that Hubbard is dead) or sometimes just on a whim are tossed into basements or kept in trailers with no furnishings, no means of communication, and fed on slops, with frequent punishment drills. It’s like a horrible caricature of a banana republican prison — it is a prison.
But there aren’t locks on the doors. The inmates stay there, punishing themselves, begging for more, all in the hopes of achieving redemption in the eyes of the psychotics running the show. The whole book is a lesson on how human psychology can be warped and used by religion, leading people to submit to commands that I can’t imagine ever respecting…but they are led step by step into an earthly hell, all the while thinking it’s paradise.
One thing that struck me is that Scientology is a pathological extreme, but in substance it’s no different than other religions. And this was confirmed in a discussion of the numerous court cases that challenged Scientology. Scientology had its tax exemption as a religion stripped from it for a long while, and fought hard to get it back (and they eventually did, in a craven capitulation by the IRS). One of their allies in these trials was a former Franciscan friar and product of the Harvard Divinity School, Frank Flinn, who happily defined religion for the courts and pointed out that Scientology was just like Catholicism.
Flinn defined religion as a system of beliefs of a spiritual nature. There must be norms for behavior — positive commands, and negative prohibitions or taboos — as well as rites and ceremonies, such as initiations, prayers, and services for weddings and funerals. By these means, the believers are united into an identifiable community that seeks to live in harmony with what they perceive as the ultimate meaning of life. Flinn argued that Scientology amply fulfilled these requirements, even if it different in expression of them from traditional denominations.
Like Catholicism, Flinn explained, Scientology is a hierarchical religion. He compared L. Ron Hubbard to the founders of Catholic religious orders, including his own, started by Saint Francis of Assisi, whose followers adopted a vow of poverty. Financial disparities within a church are not unusual. Within the hierarchy of Catholicism, for instance, bishops often enjoy a mansion, limousines, servants, and housekeepers; the papacy itself maintains thousands of people on its staff, including the Swiss Guards who protect the pope, and an entire order of nuns dedicated to being housekeepers for the papal apartments.
The Catholic Church also maintains houses of rehabilitation (like the RPF) for errant priests hoping to reform themselves. Flinn saw the RPF as being entirely voluntary and even tame compared to what he experienced as a friar in the Franciscan Order. He willingly submitted to the religious practice of flagellation on Fridays, whipping his legs and back in emulation of the suffering of Jesus before his crucifixion.
…
One of Flinn’s most interesting and contested points had to do with hagiography, by which he meant attributing extraordinary powers — such as clairvoyance, visions of God or angels, or the ability to perform miracles — to the charismatic founders of a religion. He pointed to the virgin birth of Jesus, the ability of Buddha to “transmigrate” is soul into the heavens, or Moses bringing manna to the people of Israel. Such legends are useful in that the bolster the faith of a community, Flinn said. The glaring discrepancies in Hubbard’s biography should be seen in the light of the fact that any religion tends to make its founder into something more than human.
I found myself agreeing entirely with Flinn: Scientology is a religion, different in no substantial way from Catholicism, and I think it should be classified as such. No problem.
What irritates me, though, is that anyone can read that and argue that any religion deserves a tax exemption, or should be regarded as anything more than a self-aggrandizing perpetual money-making machine for the hierarchy. As I said, the IRS did eventually give in in an out-of-court settlement and let the Church of Scientology have everything they wanted…but the message they should have taken away is that no church deserves special treatment. Tax ’em all. Remind the world that all of their mythologies are lies, and that all are just as corrupt and just as fraudulent as Scientology.
Kylie Sturgess has a documentary on the Australian Scientology RPF. Another thing brought up is how they keep children in ignorance, a point also brought up in Wright’s book with an example of one young woman.
Lauren was told that Scientologists shouldn’t look at negative stories about the religion. She was supposed to be saving the planet, so why was she wasting her time reading lies? Because of her isolation, and the censorship imposed on her education, when Lauren finally graduated from high school at the age of twenty, she had never heard anyone speak ill of Scientology, nor did she question the ban on research about her religion. She thought, “I guess I’m not supposed to do these things. I will stay away.” Like her father [Paul Haggis], she learned it was easier not to look.
I am constantly dunned by email and tweets from the haters and sick scumbags, and I read stuff by my colleagues who get far worse, and at times it is just too depressing and dismal — there really are reactionary fanatics within atheism who refuse to recognize the responsibility to work towards equality. And I just want to give up.
But then…perspective. Step away from the smears and assaults and slime and look at the movement as a whole: look at the leading organizations of the godless. You know what you’ll see? None of them support these loons. They’re all progressive and committed to improving the diversity of the atheist community and broadening our engagement with the greater culture.
Really. Look at American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, the Center for Inquiry, Atheist Alliance International and Atheist Alliance America, the Secular Coalition, the Secular Student Alliance, and the Richard Dawkins Foundation. They are not supporting these petty, resentful snipers; they are working towards a future in which those goons are irrelevant.
That’s reassuring. There are loud, obsessive, creepy people who should not be ignored, but it’s always a good idea to step back and look at the bigger picture, and see that their skirmishing is born of desperation — they’re the past, they’re the failures, they’re the ones who have no productive role to play.
Rebecca Watson has a different perspective. She’s less sanguine about organizations (and particularly the RDF), and I’m not going to argue with someone who has been the target of so much hatred, some of it inspired by Richard Dawkins’ remarks. I will agree entirely that any virtue in these organizations rest on the efforts of individuals who have struggled hard to bring inherently conservative institutions towards a more just perspective, and we cannot rest — we all have to keep fighting that fight.
We’ve been missing it, and it sounds like it’s been a phenomenal success.
- In Raleigh, NC, three people, including a sheriff’s deputy, were wounded when a shotgun gun accidentally discharged at the show’s safety check-in booth.
- In Medina, OH, a gun dealer was checking out a semi-automatic pistol he had just bought shooting an old friend if his in the leg and arm.
- In Indianapolis, IN, a man was loading .45 he had just purchased when ha accidentally shot himself in the hand.
- In Tupelo, MI, an accidental discharge grazed one man and injured a four year-old child with bullet fragments after hitting a wall.
- In Marietta, GA, an man was shot in the ankle by a friend who was showing it to a third person.
Maybe if we made it Gun Appreciation Month these idiots would end up exterminating themselves. Although I’m afraid they’d probably end up taking out a few innocent bystanders, like that four year old.
Seals. Having sex.
Dang. It’s neither cute nor graceful, is it?
Lately, I’ve been marveling at the stupidity of my foes: I mean, really, the hate campaigns have been getting absurd. Reap Paden put together a crude animated video of me, caricatured with breasts (because, you know, feminist), and then another slymeclown named “Mykeru” is circulating on twitter a cheesy image he photoshopped together, putting my face on the body of a hairy fat man in his underwear. (The laugh is on him, though, because he made me look better! Trust me, if you could see the squamous batrachian horror that oozes and trembles obscenely beneath these clothes, you would all go mad.) These are their arguments; this is the quality of my opponents. They are desperately stupid.
But then it stopped being funny, and it sank in that women are always going to get it worse than I do. You should see the comment Ophelia got.
Maybe a vial of acid would do you some good. You already look like you were set on fire and put out with a wet rake.
That’s from some slymeguy named Jerry Conlon, and it’s chilling. Throwing acid at women who offend them…why, that’s what evil barbaric Muslims do!
Nope, now it’s what atheists threaten to do.
That’s my great disappointment. I’d once thought that atheism was a good first step on the path to living a rational, tolerant life. Clearly it’s not. That’s been demonstrated to me on a daily basis for the last couple of years.
I was wrong. Atheism is not enough.
Professors Molly Secor-Turner and Brandy Randall of North Dakota State University were recently awarded a $1.2 million federal grant. Good news, right? The state should be happy, the university should be happy.
NDSU is turning it down and returning the money.
WHY? Because this is a grant to provide comprehensive sex education to teenagers in the Fargo area, in collaboration with Planned Parenthood. The state legislature, stacked as it is with regressive conservative jerkwads, freaked out and went scrambling to find a legal way to forbid it. And the president of the university, Dean Bresciani, is going along with it.
“Whether technically or not, in my evaluation, it’s not respecting the intent of our Legislature,” he said. “And that’s close enough to me. We’re not looking for loopholes to work around our Legislature; we work in respect of our Legislature.”
Bresciani said the recent discovery prompted him to freeze the funding. If the money can’t be redirected appropriately, he said, it will be returned to the federal government.
“What we’ve found is a very specific codicil of the law that makes it clear that it cannot be with Planned Parenthood,” he told Hennen. “And unless we can work around that, and again I’m not holding out hope on that, we’ll have to go to the direction of returning the resources.”
I have some words for you, Bresciani: your mission, as the president of a major university, is to improve the knowledge of the citizens of your region. Your faculty know that. Your students are going to your school for that purpose. When your legislature is actively working to undermine the mission of a university, it should be your job to oppose them. I know, they hold the purse strings; but that’s why you get paid the big bucks, because you have the difficult job of negotiating with idiots to serve a higher purpose. If you’re just going to cave in and do their bidding, well, the legislature could save even more money by simply hiring a dullard who would say “yes” to everything they ordered. Or did they already do that?
Oh, wait. Maybe that’s too many words, too long, too difficult. How about one word?
Chickenshit.
That’s a chickenshit move by a chickenshit administrator serving a chickenshit legislature.
Better?
What’s also rotten, as the paper makes clear, is that the North Dakota legislature is dishonestly strong-arming the university. There is no specific law that says the university cannot receive this federal grant. Here’s the stretch they made:
In 2011, North Dakota lawmakers approved a law effective as of July 2012 that requires K-12 schools in the state to ensure any sexual health curriculum “includes instruction pertaining to the risks associated with adolescent sexual activity and the social, psychological, and physical health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity before and outside marriage.”
However, the NDSU professors awarded this grant previously told The Forum that law wouldn’t apply to their program because it was to be taught outside of the schools and only to those teens who voluntarily agreed to participate with parental consent.
Not only is that a chickenshit law, it doesn’t apply. And man, but North Dakota really wants to keep their young people ignorant.
Oh, look. The paper has a poll to go with the article.
Yes 37.7%
No 54.1%
Don’t know 8.3%
After the public scouring of Wickramasinghe’s claims that he’d found diatoms in a meteorite, the godawful HuffPo has, of course, given him a free and credulous article in which to defend himself. The amazing thing is that even in a puff piece that doesn’t challenge him at all, he shoots himself in the foot.
Plait claims that the diatoms Wickramasinghe found, "a type of algae, microscopic plant life," are simply a freshwater species found on Earth. Wickramasinghe doesn’t deny that the meteorite sample his team studied contains freshwater diatoms.
"But — there are also at least half a dozen species that diatom experts have not been able to identify," Wickramasinghe said.
Boom, we’re done. That is an open admission that his sample is contaminated. It doesn’t matter that some portion of his sample is unidentifiable — and most likely, it’s the stuff he calls ‘filaments’ and ‘red rain cells’ that aren’t even biological … he cannot claim that the only possible source of that material is outer space.
And then there’s this vague bit:
Critics have also asserted that the meteorite in question may not, in fact, be from outer space. Could it simply be an Earth rock?
According to Wickramasinghe, "This was also the guess of the Sri Lankan geologists who first looked at the rock. They had considered the possibility that the rock may be … a rock that was struck by lightning. We examined this possibility and found it to be untenable. From all the evidence we possess (and we are planning to publish this), I personally have no doubt whatsoever that this was a stone that fell from the skies."
So the expert geologists tell him it’s a terrestrial rock, and then declares on the basis of unpublished evidence that he won’t describe that it can’t be. Right. I’m unconvinced. It doesn’t even matter if it is a meteorite or not at this point — it’s contaminated, and he published it as if it were not.
Uh-oh — I told a student just last week that I thought she’d make an excellent science journalist. Maybe it wasn’t such good advice.
95 weekly science sections in newspapers in 1989
34 weekly science sections in newspapers in 2005
19 weekly science sections in newspapers in 2012
OK, we’re all done with professional bully, liar, and drug abuser Lance Armstrong, right?
The interview began with seven very effective yes or no questions, getting the central truths, the truths Armstrong has denied for so long, out of the way in a brutal incantation: Did you ever take banned substances to enhances your cycling performance? Yes. EPO? Yes. Blood doping? Yes? Testosterone, Cortisone, Human Growth Hormone? Yes. Was he doping for all seven of his Tour De France victories? Yes.
That Armstrong is a fraud who doesn’t deserve the millions of dollars he’s sitting on right now isn’t even a question anymore. The only real question is…is professional cycling roughly equivalent to professional wrestling on the hokum scale?
