Some time ago at my former site, I wrote about the troubling issue of sexism in the atheism movement, a post that generated a lively discussion.
Over at Almost Diamonds Stephanie Zvan provides information about the Women in Secularism conference to be held May 18-20 of this year in Washington, DC. For more details, see here.
The conference should make an important contribution to this topic and I look forward to reading about what ensues.
I have suspected for some time that Jesus was not really that into presidential politics. The candidates who are his most fervent and vocal admirers never seem to get very far despite being specifically asked by Jesus to run. After going AWOL during the Iowa caucuses and not giving Michele Bachmann the miracle win he had promised her but leaving her in last place, Jesus also dumped Rick Santorum into fifth place yesterday in New Hampshire. Meanwhile Rick Perry came in fifth in Iowa and last yesterday.
But you can always depend on Jesus when it comes to his one true love, sports, and last weekend he unambiguously played a big role in giving Denver quarterback Tim Tebow a huge win over the Steelers on Sunday.
How do I know that it was Jesus behind that? The head of a Denver Broncos fan site spoke on part 2 of the radio program As It Happens about all the telltale signs that god was actively involved.
He said there was a strange cloud formation in the shape of a halo over the stadium during the game that suggests that Jesus was actually present, in person.
Furthermore Tebow passed for exactly 316 yards and his yards per completion was 31.6. You know what else has that sequence of digits? John 3:16, the one and only biblical verse that many Christians can recite. Tebow would sometimes write that verse number on his eye black and although he did not do so last Sunday, that game was played three years to the day after the first time he did that.
The fan actually missed some other signs. Tebow 10 completed passes, exactly the same number as the commandments god gave to Moses. He had three touchdowns (two passing, one rushing), which of course symbolizes that each member of the Trinity took turns to help with them.
That wealth of evidence is good enough for me. Jesus is back, baby!
I have always been interested in politics and still am but as time goes by my focus has shifted from electoral politics to mass movement politics. I simply cannot get too interested in the 2012 presidential and congressional elections, except insofar as they shed some light on the state of the nation. I still follow the process, but cursorily and with detachment and amusement, the way that I follow sports. I will check the results and the standings but the outcomes do not stir in me the passions they once did. It is mass movement politics on which I pin my hopes of creating a more just society.
Matt Taibbi captures my feelings almost exactly in this article, saying many of the things I have been saying, but more interestingly. In a single essay he lays bare the corrupt reality that elections in the US have become. He notes that in 94% of the races, the candidate who raises the most money wins. And then he shows that the same groups of investment banks and legal firms that serve those banks, basically the one-percenters, contribute heavily to both presidential candidates.
The article is excellent, if depressing. I started to excerpt some key passages but they got so long that it is best if you read the article for yourself. I will restrict myself to just one quote.
The 1% donors are remarkably tolerant. They’ll give to just about anyone who polls well, provided they fall within certain parameters. What they won’t do is give to anyone who is even a remote threat to make significant structural changes, i.e. a Dennis Kucinich, an Elizabeth Warren, or a Ron Paul (hell will freeze over before Wall Street gives heavily to a candidate in favor of abolishing their piggy bank, the Fed). So basically what that means is that voters are free to choose anyone they want, provided it isn’t Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, or some other such unacceptable personage.
If the voters insist on supporting such a person in defiance of these donors – this might even happen tonight, with a Paul win in Iowa – what you inevitably end up seeing is a monstrous amount of money quickly dumped into the cause of derailing that candidate. This takes overt forms, like giving heavily to his primary opponents, and more covert forms, like manufacturing opinions through donor-subsidized think tanks and the heavy use of lapdog media figures to push establishment complaints.
And what ends up happening there is that the candidate with the big stack of donor money always somehow manages to survive the inevitable scandals and tawdry revelations, while the one who’s depending on checks from grandma and $25 internet donations from college students always winds up mysteriously wiped out.
Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald gives his take on the US elections in the pages of The Guardian, explaining why the Republican race has become so bizarre. Because Barack Obama is governing as a centrist Republican, he has forced the Republican candidates to take extreme right-wing positions, merely to contrast themselves to him.
The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.
In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party’s ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.
In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party’s defining beliefs. Depicting the other party’s president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.
US elections have two stages. In the first, known as the primaries, any candidate who threatens the status quo of rule by oligarchy is ruthlessly weeded out by a coalition of oligarchy, party leadership, and their allies in the major media. This ensures that some major issues will never be discussed seriously in the second stage of the general election.
But in this second stage, the two pro-oligarchy party candidates will be portrayed as radically different in order to give voters the illusion that we really have a choice and that democracy is thriving. It is not that there is no difference at all between the two candidates but that the differences involve largely social issues that I call GRAGGS issues (god, race, abortion, guns, gays, sex) that the oligarchy does not much care about either way. This is why I think that real challenges to oligarchic control will only come about because of real anger in the streets, similar to that spawned by the Occupy Wall Street movement, at the way that the country is run.
I think that this is why it is important for people to realize that they should never give their total allegiance to candidates. Support them on those issues you agree with but be willing to also harshly criticize them on those that you don’t.
Some time ago, I passed on information about a new feature film called The Ledge (2011) that had an atheist character as the lead. The film was written and directed by Matthew Chapman, who happens to be the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. I finally had a chance to see it over the weekend and I have to confess that it was a big disappointment. Even though I wanted to like it, the film has so many flaws that I simply cannot recommend it anyone.
The story begins with a person standing on the ledge of a high building and threatening to jump, and consists of flashbacks as he and the police officer assigned to talk him down exchange their personal histories.
The main problem is that it is overwritten. The script is too preachy and tries to hit too many obvious points in the religion/atheism debate. It is not subtle. Furthermore, the story is highly implausible and three of the main lead characters (the atheist, the Christian, and the Christian’s wife) are unsympathetic and their portrayals (by Charlie Hunnam, Patrick Wilson, and Liv Tyler respectively) are leaden.
The one redeeming feature in the film is Terrence Howard as the police officer who tries to talk the atheist off the ledge. He has more acting skills than the other lead actors combined and the subplot involving his character was more interesting than the main story.
I think that the best way to deal with religion in films is with humor. Religious beliefs are so preposterous and the history of religions so bizarre that it makes for ripe pickings for comedians. Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying are good examples of how to do it.
Maybe a serious film that deals with atheism well will come along someday.
One commenter to my previous post wondered if I could write about the Big Bang model, dark matter, dark energy, and so on in a manner accessible to the lay reader. This raises an interesting issue of what to do about the posts that I wrote before I moved here and which are currently archived on my old site. Those archives are in the process of being moved over here but I am not sure when that transfer will be completed.
People are welcome to browse the old category archives where they will find that I have written on a fairly wide variety of topics. If readers would like me to address a specific topic, I may be able to point them to one already written.
New readers at FtB may not be aware that on occasion I make people suffer through a multi-part series of posts on topics that I think require careful explanation. In this particular case, I wrote a 16-part series on the topic Big Bang for beginners that addressed the topic that was requested. Posts 8 and 9 in the series dealt with the role of dark matter and dark energy.
So please keep those requests and suggestions coming.
I have chosen as my comment policy that the first comment by someone has to be approved by me but once approved that person will be able to post comments freely.
I will try to check frequently and apologize in advance if work and other pressures result in delays and your first comment not appearing as soon as you might like.
The blogging software here is different from what I am used to so there may be some rough patches early on until I get the feel of things. If readers notice anything that can be improved upon, I would be grateful for their suggestions.
I have decided to take up the offer to move to Freethought Blogs. The change will take effect immediately and my new site is already up here. I reposted yesterday’s Santorum post over there to get a feel of how to use the new platform. I will continue to maintain this site with all its archives and will monitor it to clear up the spam and respond to any questions and comments that warrant them but new posts will only appear over at the new site.
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Most people have probably heard that Rick Santorum was given a hard time by a group of college students in New Hampshire because of his opposition to same sex marriage, which resulted in him being booed and jeered at the end. You can see the video at the bottom of this news story. What people may not have been noticed is that this was a group of college Republicans, which shows how the younger generation across the political spectrum views giving gays equal rights much more favorably than the old. Homophobia is dying, and dying quickly.
In responding to the question of why he opposed same sex marriage, Santorum exploited a debating trick in which one shifts the point of discussion ever so slightly away from something that is hard to defend against to something else that is easier to defend. The students were not prepared for this and though they sensed that they were getting a non sequitur, they could not quite put their finger on the flaw at that moment. This is not a good thing for Santorum because the students will figure out later what he did and why he was wrong and it will make them angry that he tried to snooker them. I think the jeers at the end were from those who already realized what he was doing but did not get the chance to make their case.
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I’d like to thank Ed Brayton and the rest of the people at Freethought Blogs for inviting me to join them.
I am not new to blogging, however, having done it for nearly seven years over at my old site which contains the archive of old posts that I hope to copy over here in due course. My interests tend to vary over a lot of topics, in addition to the ones listed on the banner.
I would like to express my special thanks to Norm Nason, editor of the excellent web magazine Machines Like Us, and a person of many artistic talents whose work can be seen here, for designing the above banner.
New posts will commence as soon as I get the hang of the new system here which uses a different platform from the one I am used to.
So with that introduction out of the way, onward and upward!
Some of the most interesting segments on The Daily Show are those involving authors and books that I had never heard of before. In this segment, Jon Stewart interviews Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, author of A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons.
A review of the book can be read here.