Gluttons for punishment

Would you believe that Greta Christina of Greta Christina’s Blog, Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist, Jen McCreight of Blag Hag, and JT Eberhard of Zerowing21, after the severe beat-down I gave them and even before they had belatedly dragged themselves over the finish line in our race to raise money for Camp Quest, are now changing the terms of our competition and saying that the winner is whoever raises the most money by the end of this month?

No fair, I say! Moving the goalposts, I complain! Just like a bunch of dastardly atheists, I declare. Well, I will just have to lazily raise another tentacle and crush them again. The widget will be up on the sidebar all month, and I’ll periodically remind you to contribute, again.

And remember, if it’s annoying you like an NPR fundraising campaign, it’s their fault. I wouldn’t reward them for their obnoxious behavior if I were you — funnel all your donations through me, the nice guy who would rather not harrass you, unlike Greta, Hemant, Jen, and JT.

I can’t just beg without giving you some reward. Here, behold the fate of those who oppose me.

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Osama Bin Laden dead

There isn’t much information available, but apparently Osama Bin Laden has been killed and his body recovered. I’m expecting his head to be mounted on a pike outside the White House now.

So…are we done? Can we bring the troops home and call off the war on terror?

Some people don’t seem to realize that my words above are sarcastic. Allow me to clarify.

While it’s necessary to stop terrorists, sometimes with violence, it is barbarous to gloat over the execution of an enemy. I find the chanting crowds cheering over the corpse disturbing, and the triumphal tone of our leaders is misplaced. We killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and threw away trillions of dollars, and our trophy is the bloody corpse of one old man? There’s no victory in that.

I’m also cynical. What was the point? Nothing will change. We live in Idiot America, which is also Fearful America, which is also Paranoid America, which is also Solve-Our-Problems-With-A-Gun America. One figurehead is dead, now the focus of our country’s fear will shift to some amorphous mass of generic Muslims, and the troops will continue their destruction, and we’ll still flag our cowardice with pointless color changes at our airports, and we’ll continue to sacrifice our civil liberties at the altar of national security. Nothing was accomplished, our purpose is as vague and tyrannical as ever, we’ll need to continue to kill more to feed our illusion of safety.

Oh, there is one thing we’ve got now. A few more politicians will cloak themselves in the blood of our enemies in the next election, and victory will be achieved for Blowing Shit Up in the name of Getting Things Done. And we’ll perpetuate the violence because it appeals to our citizen savages.

Don’t let me down, Philadelphians

You know I’m coming to the big city in less than two weeks, right? I’ll be at the Anti-Superstition Bash on Friday, May 13, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM at the Corinthian Yacht Club, in Essington, PA. You know you want to go, if for nothing else for the snooty thrill of being able to tell your friends you have an engagement at the Yacht Club to attend that evening.

I’ll do my best to dispel any bad luck you might be experiencing right now, replacing it instead with chance events.

He’s not a racist — he’s just a Patriotic Tea-Partier

Say hello to Grady Warren, presidential candidate representing the Florida Tea Party. He’s not a racist, he says, he’s just “tired of Blacks, nigras, Muslims, and Hispanics, especially the illegals, calling us racist for trying to save the America that we love.”

I bet you can’t make it all the way to the end of this video. I only got about halfway before I shut it down.

That’s our Michele!

Michele Bachmann opened her mouth again. She compared increasing the tax rates for the rich to the Holocaust.

She said she was shocked to hear that many Americans weren’t aware that millions of Jews had died until after World War II ended.

Bachmann said the next generation will ask similar questions about what their elders did to prevent them from facing a huge tax burden.

“I tell you this story because I think in our day and time, there is no analogy to that horrific action,” she said, referring to the Holocaust. “But only to say, we are seeing eclipsed in front of our eyes a similar death and a similar taking away. It is this disenfranchisement that I think we have to answer to.”

Shorter Michele Bachman: “Expecting me to bear a fair share of my civic responsibility is like gassing me to death!”

Pat yourselves on the back, godless folk

Read the latest from Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman. Are we smug and arrogant? Damned right, and with good reason.

A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.

Consider that at the societal level, murder rates are far lower in secularized nations such as Japan or Sweden than they are in the much more religious United States, which also has a much greater portion of its population in prison. Even within this country, those states with the highest levels of church attendance, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, have significantly higher murder rates than far less religious states such as Vermont and Oregon.

As individuals, atheists tend to score high on measures of intelligence, especially verbal ability and scientific literacy. They tend to raise their children to solve problems rationally, to make up their own minds when it comes to existential questions and to obey the golden rule. They are more likely to practice safe sex than the strongly religious are, and are less likely to be nationalistic or ethnocentric. They value freedom of thought.

Don’t get complacent, though: being good takes hard work. No slacking allowed, you are all expected to be well-behaved, and the only naughtiness allowed is the delightful, delicious kind.

Wait, I thought they believed in an absolute morality?

It’s always interesting when some god-walloper honestly follows through on the logical implications of his beliefs — he basically is compelled to admit that if you worship a tyrannical monster, you have to end up rationalizing monstrous tyrannies. The latest to enlighten us with excuses for bronze age barbarisms and brutalities is William Lane Craig, who thinks that tales from the Bible of God’s Chosen People slaughtering babies is A-OK:

Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.

Therefore, if I station myself outside a church door with an AK-47 and murder all the happy saved Christians exiting the service, I am doing the Lord’s work. Well, gosh, Willie, not only do I get to be a mass-murderer for fun, I can be self-righteous about it, too! It’s too bad I’m one of those atheists who doesn’t believe in a Happy Fun Land for the dead, so I can’t honestly do that in good conscience.

I will be interested to see if Craig now has a Christian perspective on abortion, that is, that it is a process that releases blameless innocents to heaven’s incomparable joy, and is therefore to be encouraged.

But you know who was really suffering when soldiers rampaged through a village, smashing babies’ heads against walls and raping the women and stabbing them to death afterwards? Not the women and children, oh no. Think of the rapists and murderers!

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

No. No, I can’t imagine that. I can imagine parts of it: I can imagine a long, heavy piece of sharp metal in my hands. I can imagine a frightened, unarmed woman in front of me, trying to shelter her children. The part I can’t imagine, the stuff I’m having real trouble with, is imagining voluntarily raising my hand and hacking them to death. I have a choice in that situation, and I know myself well enough that if have to choose between killing people and letting them live, I’d let them live, not that it would be a difficult decision at all. I also have no illusion that, in this imaginary situation where I have all the power and my ‘enemies’ are weak and helpless, I am the one who is being wronged.

I also tried imagining myself with a nasty cruel weapon standing before a cowering William Lane Craig. Nope, still doesn’t work; I’d set the blade aside. Except in this case I’d take a great more care to make sure Craig couldn’t get his hands on it — I don’t trust that amoral bastard.

Greta Christina makes a very good point about this. I don’t think William Lane Craig is an intrinsically evil human being. But this is a case where it is clear that religion is a tool that allows good people to bypass decent moral positions and find justification to do evil.