That makes sense, right?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
After the serious earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, a website popped up that blamed the event on gays and lesbians, prostitution, and baby seal clubbing, a website that has been rightfully denounced by the media and gay and lesbian groups.
But I’m suspicious. There are a couple of things that make me doubt; one is that the site is a little too free in flaunting photos of naked people from gay events in New Zealand, which is not typical of conservative religious sites. Another problem is the excess — it is clearly trying to be sensationalist. And yet there is no one, no church taking credit for the site, which is very peculiar.
This isn’t a site representative of much of anything. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s either the work of an obsessive religious zealot — an individual, not a group — or of someone intentionally trying to discredit religion with an over-the-top fake. Either way, whoever made that crazy site needs some pity.
Little Dougie (aka Ian Murphy) has hit the big time: he punked the Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, by calling him up and pretending to be über-Rethuglican puppet master David Koch…and Walker believed him and babbled like a little kid on Santa’s lap. It’s a self-aggrandizing embarrassment, with Walker bragging about how he was Reaganesque, that he was pitting stereotypical blue-collar workers against the unions, and how he has a baseball bat in his office that he’d use to enforce his demands with the Democrats. It’s dreadful stuff, and when caught with his guard down it’s very clear that Scott Walker is against us, the people of this country, and sides entirely with the plutocrats and oligarchs. As Murphy sums it up:
So there you have it, kids. Government isn’t for the people. It’s for the people with money. You want to be heard? Too fucking bad. You want to collectively bargain? You can’t afford a seat at the table. You may have built that table. But it’s not yours. It belongs to the Kochs and the oligarch class. It’s guarded by Republicans like Walker, and his Democratic counterparts across that ever-narrowing aisle that is corporate rule, so that the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots can swallow all the power in the world. These are known knowns, and now we just know them a little more.
But money isn’t always power. The protesters in Cairo and Madison have taught us this–reminded us of this. They can’t buy a muzzle big enough to silence us all. Share the news. Do not retreat; ReTweet.
The revolution keeps spinning. Try not to get too dizzy.
Good work, Mr Murphy.
Oh, wait…that name sounds so familiar. I got a phone call once from Ian Murphy, too! And he interviewed me! At least I don’t think I was as big an idiot as Scott Walker.
The Rethuglican governor of Maine, Paul LePage, has been dismissing the health risks from Bisphenol A, an additive to plastics which is known to be an estrogen mimic. His remarks take “Not even wrong” to whole new levels of crazy:
The only thing that I’ve heard is if you take a plastic bottle and put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen. So the worst case is some women may have little beards.
Hey, I’ve heard that high densities of homeopaths and other quacks in your state gives off fumes that cause severe mental retardation in civil servants. Could it be?
Ladies of Pharyngula, who knew that if only you increased your estrogen levels a bit more, you too could sprout a lovely beard like me? I’m sure there are better ways to maximize your beauty than stuffing milk jugs in your microwave, though. I don’t recommend ever taking health advice from a Republican.
Here is the last of Anthony Horvath’s ghastly morality tales. This one is the easiest to summarize, because there isn’t much to say about it: Richard Dawkins dies, goes to heaven, is judged, and sent to hell. It’s short, only seven pages long, and five of them are spent in loving description of the disintegration of Dawkins. It’s nothing but a horror story for Christians in which the bad guy meets a grisly end.
Polk County, Florida has a public school board that meets in the county school district auditorium to discuss the secular, governmental functions of running the public schools. Despite their purpose, though, they insist on opening with a prayer, a practice which has encountered some criticism and which they have dealt with evasively and dishonestly.
Earlier this month, the School Board began a new practice in which the board placed a disclaimer on the meeting agenda and held a prayer before the meeting officially began.
The policy change came after a letter from the Freedom From Religion Foundation threatened a lawsuit if prayers during regular meetings continued.
The disclaimer reads: “Voluntary invocation may be offered before the opening of the School Board meeting by a private citizen. The views or beliefs expressed in the invocation have not been reviewed nor approved by the School Board, and the Board is not allowed, by law, to endorse the religious beliefs or views of this, or any other speaker.”
So they invited a local minister to say a prayer before the meeting officially began. Everyone is present, sitting in their chairs, ready to get to work on public business, but they’re just pretending the meeting hasn’t actually started until their god-botherer has finished begging Jesus to come into their lives.
It’s a lie and a game. They are still making religion part of the session, and there is no reason any gods need to be invoked prior to handling secular affairs. But of course the purblind Christian wankers on the board don’t see any problem with stuffing their religion in everyone’s faces.
John Kieffer sees the problem. He announced that “Prayer has no place in government!” — and he’s right — during a recent hypocritical flaunting of Jesus jabber before the meeting, and has been arrested for disorderly conduct. Apparently, invocations that are pro-god are legal, but invocations that reject gods will get you arrested in Polk County.
That challenging dogma is a criminal act isn’t the biggest issue in the county though. What’s even more appalling is the discussion that the school board then had in their meeting — they seem to think the problem will be resolved by packing more jeebus-jabber into the proceedings.
Audience member Tabitha Hunt told board members that the invocation needed to return as a part of the regular meeting.
“They (the atheist group) are very outspoken and I think as Christians we need to be just as outspoken,” she said.
Retired School Principal L.D. Wilcox said the incident brought tears to his eyes because of the children who were sitting in the audience.
“We talk about not leaving debts for our children, but what about integrity and responsibility?” Wilcox said. “It’s all right to disagree, but we have to learn how to respect one another.”
Fields said she would meet with School Board Attorney Wes Bridges about returning the prayer to its former spot on the meeting agenda.
O’Reilly said that while district officials want prayers at the meeting, it will be a costly legal fight and the district needs the community’s support.
“So if there are people who say we want prayers, then you better step up,” he said. “You go to your churches and synagogues and tell them they’ll need to help us.”
So they have a little dodge and disclaimer that they’ve implemented to justify their claim that they aren’t including religion in official county business…but now they’re arguing that they need to get more prayer into their governmental functions and that they want the local churches to help them do that. I think their cover is blown: these are wannabe theocrats in action.
Hey, this is a really good idea: No Chicks No Excuses is a speakers’ bureau that specializes in delivering expert women for speaking engagements. The only catch is that it seems to be entirely full of Australian women, who are spectacularly brilliant, of course, but there must also be plenty of brilliant American or European women, too. Does anyone know of an equivalent service that operates north of the equator?
The theologian John MacArthur has a new book titled Slave: The Hidden Truth About Your Identity in Christ. His premise is that this is what being a Christian is all about: it’s about being a slave to your lord.
“Slave” is the word that almost every English translation of Scripture has avoided using, in favor of the term “servant.” But MacArthur insists that the image of a slave is absolutely critical for understanding what it means to follow Jesus.
I think he’s on to something, actually. Those creepy stories by Horvath are all about being servile and sucking up to Jesus, after all.
Let’s make a deal. Christians get to bow and scrape and do the menial work (since Christian education involves so much corruption of science, that’s all they can do competently anyway), while we atheists get to revel in pride and arrogance and good education. We’ll be in charge, they can be our servants. It’ll be good practice for heaven, don’t you think?
Anthony Horvath is responding to my reviews with some flustery bluster. He’s insisting that you must buy his stories in order to have any credibility in questioning them, which is nonsense: I’m giving the gist of his fairy tales, and he could, for instance, clarify and expand on the themes of his story, explain what I’ve got wrong and where I’m actually seeing the True Christian™ message, but instead he chooses to run away and hide while flogging people to buy his stories.
He does throw out a hilarious complaint cloaked in his refusal to address anything I’ve written, like this:
As before, I have no interest in responding in any detail, although I might say some things when he is done. I will say: “PZ, what makes you think Antony awakes in a garden?”
Well, hey, how about the fact that the very first sentence of the story is:
When the man opened his eyes the first thing he beheld was a garden.
I’m looking forward to his denials that the Dawkins story isn’t torture porn tomorrow.
This is the weakest of Horvath’s trilogy of morbid tales of dead celebrities. It’s just not very interesting. One flaw is the protagonist: not to disparage Flew, who was an entirely respectable philosopher, but he wasn’t much of a star outside the world of academic philosophy. His sole claim to any kind of popular prominence was driven by the fact that evangelicals loved that he backed away from atheism to adopt a kind of fuzzy deism in his dotage.
He was a rational atheist until almost the end, though. He was best known for arguing that one should follow the evidence, and that until real evidence for any gods was disclosed, one ought to assume atheism as the default position. He later converted to deism, claiming (erroneously!) that the argument from design was persuasive.
Horvath’s story is mainly a tiresome exercise in mocking Flew’s arguments. The vehicle is that dead Flew wakes up in a garden, and a gardener comes along and has a boring dialogue with him.
They’re getting hard to keep track of — but they do provide fodder for the thread full of fierce heathens.
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