This year’s Upchucky award, which is “bestowed upon that person or organization who persists in denying evolution despite a blizzard of empirical evidence,” has gone to a particularly deserving entity: Answers in Genesis. Their plan to build a giant “life-sized” model of a fictitious boat and use it to miseducate children is a brilliant example of upchuckiness.
I don’t think I do — her history of policies in the state just screams racist. But she has suddenly become a concerned egalitarian, signing a law to protect minorities and women. She says. The law is actually designed to increase control of the reproductive rights of women and minorities — it criminalizes abortion if it is done for certain reasons.
Under the new Arizona statute, doctors and other medical professionals would face felony charges if they could be shown to have performed abortions for the purposes of helping parents select their offspring on the basis of gender or race.
First, is this a real problem? Are there very many white women demanding abortions because, to their great surprise, the father might have been black or brown? Are there many Hispanic women clamoring to get that pale-skinned mutant out of their uteruses?
Second, it’s a peculiar approach: abortion is legal. It is invasive and irrelevant to intrude on a woman’s personal decision in these matters, yet they plan to arrest people for their reasoning? Weird.
Third, look who’s being punished: the doctors. So a woman may be referred to a specialist ob-gyn who, with an appropriate evaluation of the patient’s health and emotional stability, carries out a legal medical procedure…and then later the doctor can be arrested if the patient makes a racist or sexist remark about the aborted fetus? That makes no sense.
This isn’t a bill to defend minorities. It’s a bill to make the position of abortion doctors even more precarious and difficult, and to give the state a pretext to lock them up in jail. It’s nothing but intimidation.
Earlier, I posted a photo of a saguaro — Rob Bartlett had to one-up me by sending me this photo of a saguaro+.
Don’t worry, it’s not such a big deal, as the thread of infinite lives and this video demonstrates.
(Current totals: 12,133 entries with 1,326,356 comments.)
Sikivu Hutchinson has a new book out, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars, which I have just ordered for myself. You fortunate people in LA, though, could also go hear the words straight from her mouth: she’ll be be speaking at Revolution Books on 3 April. Apparently they’ve moved since the last time I was there: they’re now located at 5726 Hollywood Blvd. You should go, if you can, or at least pick up a copy of her book — she’s one of the strong sharp voices of modern atheism.
This email from Tea Party Nation clearly shows their true egalitarian nature.
What is keeping America’s fertility rate up are immigrants – both legal and illegal. There are those in America who are continuously attacking the family, bent on redefining marriage and have established anti-family government programs. This has led to downward pressure on our national total fertility rate. All of these actions are done in the name of various causes such as: reducing unwanted pregnancies, delaying child bearing to further career goals and even promoting childlessness and promoting adoption as a better option. Child bearing has become something distasteful to many women, an unwanted and painful experience to be avoided rather than embraced. All of these programs, ideals and ideologies are doing one thing and one thing only – reducing America core TFR to the point of no return. The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population in America is headed for extinction and with it our economy, well-being and survival as a uniquely America culture. This county is dying not because it is aging, it is dying because of infertility as public policy.
See? It’s just that white people are the only ones who can be truly American.
I have a suggestion to help fix those problems: those reluctant upper-class white parents already farm out the housekeeping and childcare to illegal aliens, we just have to push back the responsibilities a little further, and make little brown foreigners use their uteruses to carry little white children, letting them do the ‘distasteful’ work. Manuring the landscaping, slaughtering chickens, harvesting the fruit, and now plopping out the babies…same difference, just another dirty job.
Ray Comfort called in to the Atheist Experience with Matt Dillahunty and Russell Glasser, and now you can watch the little twit twist and writhe and make circular arguments.
But that’s just me.
The animal rights kooks were crowing about their ‘victory’ in intimidating one student, but that’s no victory at all. Alena Rodriguez is a real person who was targeted with an intense campaign of harassment and threats, and who was made to fear for her life; all they accomplished, though, was to reveal their hand and show what kind of contemptible terrorist tactics they will use. They’ve engaged in a little consciousness-raising of their own, but it’s all going to work against them.
Speaking of Research has a new article on their opponents’ recently invigorated embrace of terrorism, and all it has accomplished is to strengthen researchers’ resolve.
Though NIO may refer to students as the “Soft bellied target of the vivisection complex” who “can be shut down with relative ease,” they should study their history. In the winter of 2005, the ALF launched a campaign that targeted students at Oxford University in the UK, declaring them to be “legitimate targets”. Did the students bow to the threats and arson attacks on their facilities? Not a chance! The students responded by launching the Pro-Test movement in support of animal research, and gave the ALF a drubbing which helped to turn the tide against AR extremism in the UK. The hate and lies of the ALF were simply no match for the solidarity shown by students and scientists at Oxford.
Similarly, the extremists at NIO may claim one victory, but they fail to see how much dedication they create at the exact same time.
At UCLA, faculty and students alike have been the target of a heinous and criminal campaign of violence and harassment. How many students have quit animal research and/or changed their careers? To our knowledge: none. Indeed, students at institutions like UCLA have become some of the most passionate and committed defenders of animal-based research.
At NIO, they see victories in stories like these. We say those victories are hollow and pathetic. If you share our view, leave a comment below showing support for Alena and other students like her. The scientists of tomorrow need to hear our voices.
As are we all. But Ray Comfort imagines what his last words will be, and they’re quite a doozy—twelve paragraphs of god babble, more mindless regurgitating of his usual evangelical spiel, culminating in this:
So, please, repent today. Confess your sins to God, and then forsake them. Then trust alone in Jesus for your eternal salvation and God will forgive you and give you everlasting life.
So, as he lays dying of terminal logorrhea and metastasizing melodrama, Ray Comfort’s last thoughts will involve hectoring everyone else around him. He’s not a very nice person. I don’t think he’s even seriously thought about what death means, either.
I’ve had my own near-death experience. It happened last summer, when I was undergoing all these examinations for my heart. I had a stress test. And I failed it.
A stress test is where they make your heart work very, very hard while they examine it; I was put in a kind of exercise/torture device and told to start pedaling as hard as I could, while electrodes all over my naked chest were recording the electrical activity, and the doctor made sonograms of my heart, which I could watch as I worked up a good sweat. And it was reassuring: my heart was strong, unscarred, beating well, with no irregularities. I made it through the whole test and did well. Then it was over, and I got out of the device, and that’s when the trouble began.
I’ve got coronary artery disease. So although the muscles of my heart are in good shape, the blood vessels supplying them are clogged and constricted. What happened next was a peculiar sensation: my heart was starved for oxygen after that workout, and it started to fade out on me. It was like driving along on your car and suddenly the engine starts to gasp and splutter because it’s not getting any fuel, and I felt the same thing you would in such a situation: helpless, because no amount of pumping the gas pedal helps, nor can I will gas to the motor, and betrayed. I rely on that heart, I take it for granted, and there it was, failing me.
If I hadn’t survived this event, as you obviously know I did, I also know what my last words would have been, and they wouldn’t have been a prolonged screed about how everyone ought to be an atheist. They would have been, “I think I need to sit down.” And that’s what I did. I wobbled a few steps into the bathroom and flopped down on the toilet. There was absolutely nothing romantic or poetic about this.
And then I felt myself going. My guts went all watery, and I felt the unpleasantness of nausea with a flabby feeling that no, I wasn’t even going to have the strength to vomit. My limbs went all rubbery and limp. I kept sweating — a cold, clammy sweat. There was a roaring whisper in my ears, and all I heard as the doctors milled about was a distant “waa waa waa” sound. My peripheral vision faded, and it seemed like I was staring down a narrow tunnel.
And I was alone.
My wife was there, there were a couple of doctors and nurses present — let me tell you, if you ever have a cardiac event, do it while in a hospital while wired to every instrument that goes ping you can find — but they all felt distant and remote. And I thought, “So this is what dying feels like.” I felt no panic or fear, just a little sad about ceasing to exist, and I thought about the important things in my life.
I had married the love of my life, and she was standing there with me. We had had three kids, and I could see them all in my mind’s eye, and they were strong and smart and good, and I could trust that they’d be all right — my only wish was that I could see them one last time. I did not see my whole life flash past my eyes, but I did recollect a brief and simple happy moment, remembering when my children were small and they’d lift their hands to hold mine. There were no regrets, my job was done.
And then…the demands of cardiac muscle eased as respiration finally rose to meet them, and I felt my heart strengthen and pump solidly again. I wasn’t out of gas after all! It was just a temporarily clogged fuel line. We’ll get that fixed at the repair shop and I can keep going down the road for a good long while yet.
So I rise from the not-quite-dead-yet, but having taken one step down that path, and I can tell you that as the darkness descends, there will be no gods or angels rising to judge you. You’ll be alone, no matter how crowded the room, and the only judge you’ll face is yourself. There will be no authority looking over your shoulder and telling you whether your life was worthy or wasted, and if there were, its opinion would be irrelevant — all that will matter is that you can look back and find happiness and accomplishment. We live our lives for our life’s sake, rather than for illusions about rewards and satisfaction after we’re dead.
If your last thoughts are about haranguing everyone else about their theology, you’ve been living that life wrong.
