Jehovah’s Witnesses once again confirm that they’re a mob of dour, po-faced killjoys. Watch MommyJW suck all the joy of of SonJW’s life, in the name of her invisible deity.
Remarkable, isn’t it, that the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving cosmic creator of the universe is so very concerned about a child’s plastic toy…and not even the toy itself, but whether the fictional backstory of the toy accords properly with dogma.
(Episode CCCXXXIV: Eject! Eject! Eject!.)
Sanctimonious Cardinal Timothy Dolan has been on a crusade against immorality: he opposes gay marriage, and was extremely irate that we might expect the Catholic church to cover its employees with insurance that pays for contraception. How dare we ask the church to pay any benefits to sluts?
It seems, though, that he’s perfectly willing to compromise the church’s high moral stand in one case:
Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York authorized payments of as much as $20,000 to sexually abusive priests as an incentive for them to agree to dismissal from the priesthood when he was the archbishop of Milwaukee. […]
But a document unearthed during bankruptcy proceedings for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and made public by victims’ advocates reveals that the archdiocese did make such payments to multiple accused priests to encourage them to seek dismissal, thereby allowing the church to remove them from the payroll.
So, on the scale of sins the church will close its eyes to, raping children in the name of the Lord rates very low, but using contraception? Unforgivable.
Hey, did you know that the schools have the job of teaching our children morality now? They’re having a tough enough time teaching reading and math, but now we’re supposed to add right and wrong. It’s nice in principle, but now there’s another problem: the powers that be believe the right way to do this is to teach them Christianity, a notion which opens the door to the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF) and their Good News Clubs. Look at one of the examples of moral thinking they teach in schools.
The CEF has been teaching the story of the Amalekites at least since 1973. In its earlier curriculum materials, CEF was euphemistic about the bloodshed, saying simply that "the Amalekites were completely defeated." In the most recent version of the curriculum, however, the group is quite eager to drive the message home to its elementary school students. The first thing the curriculum makes clear is that if God gives instructions to kill a group of people, you must kill every last one:
"You are to go and completely destroy the Amalekites (AM-uh-leck-ites) – people, animals, every living thing. Nothing shall be left."
"That was pretty clear, wasn’t it?"the manual tells the teachers to say to the kids.
Even more important, the Good News Club wants the children to know, the Amalakites were targeted for destruction on account of their religion, or lack of it. The instruction manual reads:
"The Amalekites had heard about Israel’s true and living God many years before, but they refused to believe in him. The Amalekites refused to believe in God and God had promised punishment."
The instruction manual goes on to champion obedience in all things. In fact, pretty much every lesson that the Good News Club gives involves reminding children that they must, at all costs, obey. If God tells you to kill nonbelievers, he really wants you to kill them all. No questions asked, no exceptions allowed.
Asking if Saul would "pass the test" of obedience, the text points to Saul’s failure to annihilate every last Amalekite, posing the rhetorical question:
"If you are asked to do something, how much of it do you need to do before you can say, ‘I did it!’?"
"If only Saul had been willing to seek God for strength to obey!" the lesson concludes.
Oh, yes, we now have after-school programs to tell the children that not only is it OK to kill people if god tells you to, but that having different religious beliefs is sufficient cause to justify mass murder, and that the only mistake you might make is in being insufficiently thorough in executing your foes.
We can thank the Supreme Court for this state of affairs, in a decision that said schools could not discriminate against organizations they lease their facilities to after hours (a lie; watch what would happen if the KKK tried to organize a White Supremacy Club in the schools), and worse, that teaching bible stories was a good way to instruct children in morals.
In the majority opinion that opened the door to Good News Clubs, supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas reasoned that the activities of the CEF were not really religious, after all. He said that they could be characterized, for legal purposes, “as the teaching of morals and character development from a particular viewpoint”.
I don’t expect the Supreme Court, much less Clarence Thomas, to be capable of deciding what is a proper moral lesson for my kids. I also think it’s quite clear to everyone that the Bible is a highly unethical text — it’s all about justifying evil in the name of tribal self-interest.
(via Ophelia)
That’s good news. Dave Silverman gives them the aggressive edge, but someone to shape the message more effectively would be a valuable asset. Check out the qualifications, maybe this is a job for you.
Oh, wait. You’re reading Pharyngula? Maybe you aren’t the cooperative diplomatic type they need.
I also notice the description doesn’t specify long-term association with the radical right wing of the Republican party and a complete absence of prior affiliation with the secular/atheist movement. That’s a good start.
We have an update from a Montreal newspaper on Dennis Markuze, the raging spammer who yap-yap-yapped at me and many others for over a decade. He’s free, he’s employed, he’s been ordered to abstain from participating in online discussions. That’s the good part; I also hear now and again about an occasional Mabus-like rant appearing in some obscure forum on the internet, so he might be breaking the strict wording of his orders, but at least the deluge has been dammed.
I am bothered by one thing. It sounds like his trial didn’t do him justice: he blamed everything on drug and alcohol addiction, the court agreed with him, and all of his post-trial treatment has been directed towards his addictions.
“Since the therapy team at (Freedom House) does not have the competence necessary to make a psychiatric diagnosis, it seems to us that (Markuze) absolutely needs a follow up after he leaves the centre,” Proulx wrote.
“He sometimes makes remarks that leave us perplexed.”
I’m perplexed, too. His past behaviors did not seem to be the product of being drunk — they weren’t impulsive, they were planned and obsessive. So he wasn’t actually diagnosed or treated for psychiatric problems? That’s a body of possible causes for his behavior that weren’t examined or treated in the rush to pin the blame on the simplest explanation.
As a youngster, my main charge levied against religion was that it was simply boring. I suffered through Sunday school until I was confirmed and bemoaned the fact that I was dragged to church on Christmas when all I wanted to do was stay home and play with my new dinosaur toys. Religion was a nuisance, but nothing more.
It wasn’t until middle and high school that I took a long look at Catholicism with a critical eye and realized that it absolutely did not jive with my blossoming world-view. I began to see it as sexist, homophobic, and backwards. It was then that the term “organized religion” developed its negative association. I also worked at the local Long John Silvers in a town with a large percentage of Catholics, and that didn’t help. Working during Lent was excruciating and further drove a wedge between myself and those silly rules. Belief in god was fine and dandy, but I wasn’t so much down with the rigid structure imposed by “organized religion” after that.
I suppose I was a deist in college, but never really gave it much thought. I remember distinct conversations I had with friends where they revealed that they were atheists, but I was neither appalled nor converted on the spot.
“So you don’t believe in god then?”
“Nope.”
“What do you think happens when you die?”
“Nothing.”
“Huh, interesting.”
Sometimes the exchange would be deeper, the conversation longer, and I’d maybe even think on it a bit later, but I’d usually walk away pretty unaffected. So it was to my great surprise that I randomly stumbled across something on the internet a couple years later that made me second guess everything.
I was a year or two out of college, and I read a letter entitled IN CONTEMPLATION OF MY INEVITABLE DEMISE (found here), written by Forrest J. Ackerman (Uncle Forry, the Ackermonster himself) and given to a friend to be published upon his death. Forry wrote about his atheism and I read the things that were said to me before, but this time it just stuck. I couldn’t shake the thought of god’s nonexistence out of my head, and a couple days later I made the turn and never looked back.
I would be remiss if I neglected to mention my upbringing further. My parents were wonderful, encouraging and indulging my interest in dinosaurs and paleontology with frequent trips to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, taped television specials, and tons of books. They fostered an environment that allowed me to explore our natural world through science, and I dove in head first because it was fun and interesting (subsequently the exact opposite of how I felt about church). I was raised very “loose Catholic,” and aside from the odd Catholic totem around the house, god was largely nonexistent in our home life.
And that’s how the stage was set for me to whittle away any vestige of religion in my life through successive chance encounters and exposure to new ideas. Today I acknowledge that we live in a godless universe, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m surrounded by loving friends and family, and find myself in constant awe of the grandeur and complexity of the natural world around me.
My well-intentioned mother will eventually google-search me and find this, and I’ll get a phone call explaining that the internet is forever and that I might put off some potential future employers by expressing these views in a public forum, but I can deal with that. I wouldn’t want to work for anyone who wouldn’t hire me because of this anyway, and maybe, just maybe, someone somewhere will stumble across this like I did Forry’s letter and come away with the same conclusions.
Justin Francart
In this video, I discover that baby puffins are called “pufflings”…which I find totally adorable.
(via Iceland Islande)
I knew this was going to happen. It’s been a long day and night of travel, and of course you filled up the endless thread. So quick! Get out!
(Episode CCCXXXIII: Eyjafjallajökull.)
I had been an atheist for over a decade but hadn’t realized it. It took a child to make me see that. My own child. He asked me one day why I didn’t go to church like others in our family. All these reasons flew through my head in a matter of seconds, but they all boiled down to one. “Because I don’t believe in it,” I answered him. “Me neither,” he said.
My path to disbelief began Wednesday, June 27, 1979.
I know the exact date, because I wrote it in the copy of Woody Allen’s “Without Feathers” my grandfather purchased for me on a road-trip we took together. The irony is that his faith was strong, and he never would have purchased that book for me if he’d known it would lead to the unravelling of any belief I had in his religion.
