Antisemitism still thrives

This is a very grim video; the myth of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion still lives on Muslim television. When it starts, you might be able to laugh a bit — did you know the Jews drain the blood of young boys to make matzoh balls? — but by the end, where some evil cleric is gloating over old footage of dead and dying Jews in Nazi prison camps (“look at the corpses, Allah be praised!”) and that he hopes the followers of Allah will be the next to carry out this holy work, I give you fair warning that you might well be too sickened to continue.

New Trends in Arabic Anti-semitism from Henrik Clausen on Vimeo.

I’m not a fan of Israel’s policies — they’re becoming what they oppose — but there’s clearly no possibility that they could simply stop fighting for their existence and live in peace and tolerance with neighbors who promote the kind of hate shown above.

Mexico is a weird, weird, weird place

Yesterday, among many other wanderings around Mexico City, I made a pilgrimage to the Lady of Guadalupe, the sacred Catholic heart of Mexico. It was not what I expected.

We left the subway station to join a trudging, milling mob on a hike to the basilica, which wended its way through a narrow tunnel lined with ramshackle booths where people tried to sell us all kinds of iconographic kitsch. That, I expected.

The surprise came when a horde dressed as Aztecs, half-naked with giant elaborate feathered headdresses, painted or wearing fierce masks of skulls or leopards, came charging through, forcing everyone to move off to the side to allow them to pass. They were chanting and pounding drums and waving censers about, so the whole group was wreathed in a fog of incense.

When we finally got to the plaza in front of the three basilicas (an original one, a later, larger one, and the newest, which is a huge modern building designed to accommodate the crowds), it was filled with Aztecs dancing, and all you could hear were these loud, throbbing drums. I captured a few minutes of my struggle through the mob of pilgrims, surrounded by circular spaces taken over by whirling Aztec dancers; the sound capabilities of my recorder were overwhelmed by the noise, so the roaring you hear below is the sound of the drums. You’ll just have to imagine this rhythmic cacaophony that you could feel vibrating up through your bones.

The modern basilic itself is completely open along the sides facing the plaza, so we had the pleasure of hearing a loudly amplified Catholic mass with pagan drums pounding throughout. And yes, you could see Aztec headdresses scattered throughout the crowd.

In the smaller, oldest church, they also carry out the Mass, and here’s a mother and child in Mexican Catholic formal wear, on their knees. We saw several other people making a slow crawl across the plaza on their knees, including a couple of young children with their parents hovering about (on their feet, though), as the kids made the painful trudge. I guess it makes your prayers more potent if you do them on bleeding knees.

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The syncretism is fascinating, and so far Mexico has been a delight, rich in character and history, and I’ve got to come back and spend more time here. But that religion is so fluid and flexible and complex doesn’t make it right, and the obsessive, fanatical weirdness of this unique version of Catholicism is the product of its unfamiliarity; if you step back and look at it with eyes unfilmed by tradition, every religious ceremony looks this bizarre, and every religion thrives on hope built on despair…and some try to maximize the suffering to reinforce devotion. At least the modern Aztecs draw the line before raising obsidian knives and chopping out hearts nowadays; they seemed to be having more fun than the bloody kneed Catholics.

I’m going to be in Springfield, Missouri next weekend. The weirdness bar has been raised pretty high right now, and the Assemblies of God are looking rather drab and colorless in comparison.

Bad move, A&E

The A&E Channel has a new show coming up: Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal. Sounds awful already, doesn’t it? But it’s worse than you think: they’re looking for disturbed kids who think they’ve got magic powers, and then they’re flying in “professional psychics” to coach them in dealing with their awesome powers, i.e., indulge their delusions, get off on feeling superior to unhappy kids, and collect a paycheck for psychic child abuse.

They’re putting kids in the hands of a creepy skeevo like Chip Coffey, all for your entertainment.

This is quite possibly the most loathsome thing I’ve ever seen on TV, and my cable gives me access to the Trinity Broadcast Network, so that’s saying a lot.

Skepchicks are mobilizing the skeptic hordes. Call or write to A&E and let them know that their schlock has reached a new and despicable low.

I mentioned that I have cable…but there’s almost nothing on. The quality has been on a steady decline for years; cable stations like A&E, TLC, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel were all set up with the noble goals of providing good educational/informative programming, and they’ve all sold out to provide little more than dreck ala Psychics with Serious Mental Illnesses Hunting Hitler’s Ghost While Driving A Big Truck with Their Freakish Family. It’s cheap, it’s easy, the ‘talent’ they hire are all boring nobodies with only their disturbed personalities as a selling point — these are modern freak shows, plain and simple — and audiences eat them up.

Meanwhile, look here: somebody has a petition begging someone, anyone to pick up Richard Dawkins’ thoughtful and intelligent documentaries. They’re done, they’re just sitting there, they’re begging to be broadcast…but I guess he just doesn’t have the charisma of a hammy metaphysical child abuser.

Mexicans communicating science and skepticism

It was a long day and a late evening yesterday at Primer Coloquio Mexicano de Ateísmo, and today I plan on doing some sightseeing in Mexico City. I also met a lot of Mexican atheists and skeptics and scientists yesterday, and some of them have blogs and podcasts…so here, Spanish speakers, is a list of excellent sites you ought to add to your regular reading list:

  • Pócimas, cocciones y brebajes. Una bitácora electrónica que pretende ser filtro de amor a la ciencia, y un bálsamo contra sus enemigos.

  • La Ciencia por Gusto. Versión ampliada de la columna semanal divulgación científica de Mart&iacuteln Bonfil Olivera, de la Dirección General de Divulgación de la Ciencia, de la UNAM, que aparece los miércoles en el periódico mexicano Milenio Diario.

  • Masa Crítica. El podcast Ateo.

  • Un Papá Escéptico. La Ciencia Salva!

  • Espeja Escéptic. Simplemente, Observando al Mundo.

I’ve also learned that the convention was held near a public square where the Inquisition used to burn heretics. Isn’t it sweet to consider that every one of the people above would have been dragged out, tied to a stake, and set on fire once upon a time? There is progress!

Episode CXXX: Einstein, Einstein, Einstein

Since the last episode of the thread for obsessive conversationalists was all about that Christian obsession with calling Hitler an atheist, here’s another one: religious dupes lying about Einstein to make it sound like he was on their side.

Einstein never said the words they’re putting in his mouth, and it’s a bogus argument to begin with.

(Current totals: 11,352 entries with 1,183,778 comments.)

What madness will the NY Times take seriously next?

I’ve noticed that the bad practice of “he said, she said” journalism so common at the NY Times disappears when the subject is religion. There, instead, the standard role of the journalist becomes one of the credulous, unquestioning observer. It’s evident in this new article on the revival of Catholic exorcisms, being discussed at a conference.

The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

That’s not a quote from one of the participants in the conference, it’s straight from the reporter, Laurie Goodstein. Does she really think there are patients who really need an exorcism rather than psychiatric care? Is demonic posession a real problem? Maybe Homeland Security should be involved, if we actually have an ongoing invasion by demonic creatures from Hell.

No critical thinking is presented in the article, and I was rather disappointed: the usual journalistic substitute for critical thinking is to scurry off and find some random person who disagrees, in order to toss one or two contrary quotes on the page. That’s what they’d do if the subject is evolution or climate change, for instance, and that’s the way so many cranks can get their words in major newspapers. We don’t even get that much here, though: just quotes from various people who think it’s perfectly ordinary for the Catholic Church to be promoting the idea of the Devil instead of dealing with the idea of, you know, real human people and real illness.

I would like to have seen at least one sentence suggesting that it’s nuts to be training witch doctors, but nope…this is the closest we get:

“What they’re trying to do in restoring exorcisms,” said Dr. Appleby, a longtime observer of the bishops, “is to strengthen and enhance what seems to be lost in the church, which is the sense that the church is not like any other institution. It is supernatural, and the key players in that are the hierarchy and the priests who can be given the faculties of exorcism.

“It’s a strategy for saying: ‘We are not the Federal Reserve, and we are not the World Council of Churches. We deal with angels and demons.’ “

OK, so the Catholic Church deals only with the unreal and nonexistent. Now if only we had media that dared to point out that angels and demons don’t exist.

“The ordinary work of the Devil is temptation,” he said, “and the ordinary response is a good spiritual life, observing the sacraments and praying. The Devil doesn’t normally possess someone who is leading a good spiritual life.”

In any other subject, if someone made a specific claim like that, I’d expect a good journalist to ask, “how do you know that?” and try to track down a credible source for such a claim about an individual. When the subject is the Devil, though, anything goes. You can say any ol’ crazy thing about Satan, and the reporter will dutifully write it down and publish it without ever stopping for a moment to wonder, “Hey, is my source just making shit up?”

Oh, well. It’s important news, I guess. “Catholics are crazier than we imagined!” should have been the front page headline.

Death Cult Ray is feeling peevish

Poor little Ray Comfort is out of sorts because I accused him of promoting a death cult. He does, of course; he wanders about, accusing people of being sinners damned to hell, and pretending that they can be save by believing his Jebus stories.

The amusing part about his latest whine is that he misspells my last name multiple times, even gets my initials wrong once, and also misspells Larry Moran‘s name. I don’t think his brain is working right. He also accuses me of backing out of a radio debate with him — he knows that is not true, and was informed by the radio station that it was their decision.

In addition to the bad brain, I think he just likes lying.