An encouraging development

While I’m sure it’s personally difficult for Mary Lambert, this is a good sign: a fundamentalist, literalist church is getting fundamentalist and literal on its congregation.

The First Baptist Church dismissed Mary Lambert on August 9 with a letter explaining that the church had adopted an interpretation that prohibits women from teaching men. She had taught there for 54 years.

Consistency is a virtue the religious should pursue more. When they kick out the women, there goes over half their membership; when they start stoning the adulterers and liars and usurers, they’ll be rid of 99% of the men. The religious problem in this country will be solved.

Meanwhile, maybe Ms Lambert can look up a Unitarian church in her neighborhood.

Seven small peas do not a dinner make

Orac has another tale of the Hitler Zombie—the unstoppable corpse has met Coulter, Weikert, Kennedy, Behe, Johnson, Strobel, and Taylor and eaten their BRAAAAAAAAINS. Sad to say, that was an awfully thin diet—kinda like getting served California cuisine, a few sprigs of something weedy artfully arranged on a plate, when you’re hoping for a more midwestern meal consisting of large lumps of starch and fat—and the Hitler Zombie is going to be ravenous. He will strike again.

God of fear

Newsweek has a short article on military atheists and the discrimination they face.

“There are no atheists in foxholes,” the old saw goes. The line, attributed to a WWII chaplain, has since been uttered countless times by grunts, chaplains and news anchors. But an increasingly vocal group of activists and soldiers–atheist soldiers–disagrees. “It’s a denial of our contributions,” says Master Sgt. Kathleen Johnson, who founded the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers and who will be deployed to Iraq this fall. “A lot of people manage to serve without having to call on a higher power.”

It has always seemed to me that that old myth is actually an admission: an admission that religion is driven by fear. Just crank up the terror on people, it’s saying, and we can get ’em to believe anything. There might be some truth to that, but if anything, it’s an adage that is damning to religion, saying that faith is an exploitation of human weakness.

Rah, rah, rah

If you were appalled at the cavalier cops, here’s another story to make you sneer with disgust. Jaquandor reports on a couple of kids who pulled a stupid prank that nearly killed a couple of teenagers (one had a broken neck and brain damage, and has been through 10 surgeries), and the judge gave them a couple of light sentences, and worst of all, delayed the start of their sentences…until the end of football season.

That’s right, they’re high school football players. It would be unduly harsh to prevent them from playing football, you know. And besides, the members of the football team must all be good kids. Regular saints.

I remember the football team in my high school—Kent-Meridian was big on football. I was in gym class with them. If we’d ever picked teams for our games, I would have been one of those picked nearly last; I was the skinny nerd who would have rather been anywhere else. We never picked teams, though, because the coach always divided the class into the football players vs. everyone else. So one day we’re playing basketball—if you’re unfamiliar with the game, it’s not a contact sport—when I go to make a jump shot and a 250 pound lineman takes me out with a tackle from the side. I briefly recall seeing them high-five each other before the pain blinded me: I’m really not used to having my patella on the medial side of my leg, or to having my knee bend sideways. My assailant was not rebuked, nor did I get so much as an apology from him.

I do not have a charitable view of the kind of privilege given to participants in team sports.

Oh, well. The football players who crippled another student in Kenton, Ohio are suffering horribly.

The 17-year-old’s father, C.J. Howard, said members of the community have made crude remarks when his family shops at a nearby Wal-Mart store and that his younger children are taunted by older youth when they play in the yard.

Oh, wow, man. They’re getting called mean names. By comparison, the kids who were nearly killed got off easy.