I, for one, welcome our new holy corporate overlords

You already knew that the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have First Amendment rights. Now the courts are working on giving them religion, too.

"Can a corporation exercise religion?" federal district court judge John L. Kane recently asked. He answered his own question with a provisional yes. In Newland v Sebelius, the court granted a commercial enterprise a temporary injunction exempting it, for now, from providing female employees with coverage for contraception and sterilization required by the Affordable Care Act.

The churches are already full of abstract entities with no material existence celebrated at the altar, so hey, let’s start packing the pews with them, too. In these years of declining attendance, the churches will probably welcome well-heeled worshippers, especially since letting them in also grants the churches lots of privileges.

But look where this is leading the rest of us.

Now, according to Judge Kane’s decision in Newland, secular businesses may enjoy similar status and similar immunity under federal statutes, at least, if not the Constitution. His ruling is an initial salvo in what may well be prolonged litigation, but it represents an ominous legal trend: Religious freedom is morphing into religious power. If the rights of diverse employees in a secular enterprise are subject to the beliefs of their employers, then religious people will not simply be laws unto themselves; they’ll determine, in part, laws governing the rest of us.

Religious employers are the worst employers. Now the American courts want to give them even more power to meddle in their employee’s lives…a power completely contrary to any of the principles of liberty on which this country was supposedly founded.

Wanna see something funny?

It’s a Romney campaign ad. The thesis? Obama has declared war on religion, while Romney will defend it, with shots of the Pope (not the shadowy-eyed inquisitorial current pope, but the old fatherly one, John Paul II).

There are a couple of things wrong with that. Obama is no friend of atheism; he’s expanded faith-based charity programs, continues to support the right-wing Prayer Breakfast nonsense, and has openly expressed his Christianity. I’m certainly not enthused about voting for him (athough, to be sure, his continuation of policies of tyranny and violence abroad is a bigger issue for me than his faith).

For another, why doesn’t he show the Elders of the Mormon Church rather than Pope John Paul II? I can guess: because if there’s anything creepier than one geriatric manipulator of your sex life, it’s a whole assembly of creepy geriatric genital diddlers. I haven’t looked lately, but when I was living in Salt Lake I saw those Mormon leaders in the paper all the time, and seriously, the head guy looked like the Crypt Keeper.

And finally, have you ever heard about the Mormon perspective on Catholicism? It is the “great and abominable Church”! I really wonder if this ad will be played in Morridor…I don’t think having Romney suck up to the Catholic church would play well in the Mormon homeland.

SXSW poll

The big music festival, SXSW (which I must attend someday) also has panel discussions, and apparently they accept public input on which panels to put on. Voting is going on right now, and one that’s getting some attention is “It’s Reddit’s Web. We Just Live In It.”. Here’s the description:

For many years, Reddit — a site that allows people to post, vote on, and comment on links from around the Web — was an also-ran news aggregator, a place stuck in Digg’s shadow. But suddenly Reddit has become the most exciting and influential community online. The site, which now gets billions of page views every month, was the epicenter of the Web’s protest against Congress’s SOPA copyright legislation, a gushing source of Occupy Wall Street memes (pepper-spray cop started on Reddit), and home to some of the most helpful, and the most misguided, Internet vigilantes. Redditors helped a bus monitor who was abused by her terrible kids raise hundreds of thousands of dollars; they also mistakenly attacked a cancer fundraiser, they’ve frequently posted child porn, and they’ve been accused of sexism. How is Reddit’s power altering Web culture — and should we celebrate it, or fear it?

Well, I’d question the premise that Reddit is powerful…it’s a tool for mobilizing a community of people to type faster (kinda like Pharyngula, only bigger…), which can sometimes be influential. It’s greatest weakness is it’s self-reinforcing nature, which allows really stupid, nasty people to sometimes send Reddit haring off towards really stupid schemes—like Reddit Island or their constant battles with a vocal and wretched misogynist minority, that can also wield the autocatalytic power of Reddit well.

So it sounds like an interesting panel, with provocative stuff to say on both sides of the opinion of Reddit. The description is certainly reasonable and fair.

But…the proposed panel has Rebecca Watson on it. And as we all know, that immediately fires up the hate brigade.

So of course Reddit has a thread denouncing the heretic and telling everyone to go vote it down, protesting the fact that a panel discussing the pros and cons of Reddit might actually include someone who is critical of Reddit’s slimy underbelly. They’re also upset that Shit Reddit Says, the mocking watchdog subreddit, is involved, somehow.

At the poll site, there’s another anti-Watsonista, BlueofHume1, who’s on a roll of stupid. He’s making the argument that in a community of 20 million readers, the fact that only 21,000 say “misogynistic/sexist/ablist/homophobic” stuff, by one count, means it is therefore not as bad as everyone says. He’s comparing all registered users to the vocal subset that are active commenters! I’d say it’s a bigger concern that 21,000 scumbags are allowed to thrive and promote scumbaggery on the forum. It’s an open question whether the nasty subset are a representative sample of some significant proportion of the 20 million readers, and his argument doesn’t touch it.

Anyway, if you hate faulty reasoning, if you’re just sick to death of people making excuses for women- and gay-hating fratboys and chill girls “because they are atheists”, if you’re fed up with the enemy constantly waving Rebecca Watson as the emblem of evil, go register at the SXSW site and leave a vote.

I’m still waiting for the PZome

“-ome” and “-omic” are overused, as Jonathan Eisen has been saying for years, and now the Wall Street Journal has taken notice. There are 404 “-omics” disciplines? It’s so silly that there is now a Badomics generator to invent new terms.

It’s still missing PZomics. I’m serious, it could be a real science, you know…I don’t know why researchers aren’t lining up to get cell samples from me. (There’s probably more money in Venteromics—I say “psshhht!” to their dedication to the principles of true knowledge over mere pecuniary gain.)

Why I am an atheist – Jim

I had been wondering for a while whether I should join the masses and add my own answer (and story) to the question “why are you an atheist?”. The new year brought with it a sense of “why the hell not?”.

Reading the answers of others, i’ve seen it often helps to give some basic background first. Don’t worry, most of it is relevent to the actual answer. I’m a person of the male persuasion in my early 20s, living in the pleasant (if you like mud) countryside of the east of England. I’m pretty much the stereotype of a geek/gamer (without the “fat, no sense of personal hygiene and glasses” parts). I grew up a basic countryside-dwelling family (as an only child), complete with the usual passive conservatism and Christianity – passive in the sense that it’s just “there”, everyone expects everyone else thinks the same as they do, so the subjects rarely come up. This is hardly perfect, but a lot better than being bombarded with it every day. But in other ways, it’s a lot more insidious.

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