WarSissi

Posted on by

So UK’s minister of Unreason Faith, Baroness Warsi, has resigned. Now, I always thought of her as a few cards short of a full deck – but that is an occupational requirement for someone working in the faith industry. Now I’m disappointed to see that’s she’s also a sissy.

‘When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping’ my mother used to say. When you think that your team is doing something wrong, you double down, and try to change it for the better. That’s at least what I expect from professionals. Those who can, do. Warsi, as was painfully obvious, can’t.

Never one to face difficult questions, the horrendous situation in Gaza and the difficulties in determining which side has committed less evil has prompted Warsi to take the easy way out.

She won’t be missed. A civilized country needs a Minister of Faith as much as a fish needs a bicycle.

Devil’s Due

Posted on by

The Roman Catholic Church in Grisons allegedly employs eleven professional exorcists, even though that Swiss Canton has a population of less than 200’000. Now, the Swiss are renown for their perfectionism, but that number is a bit extreme. By comparison, London would have to employ 450 exorcists to provide the same level of service. As far as I know, they don’t have any (at least not since ‘Reverend’ Andrew Arbuthnott was defrocked after a sexual assault disguised as ‘exorcism’). Is London in danger of falling to the Devil soon, or is Satan merely fond of the Alps? Or is perhaps a much more mundane reason at the bottom of this?

Christoph Casetti, chief exorcists in Chur, states that demand for his services is high (if not high-as-a-kite). One of the reasons is that in 1976 german priests managed to kill their victim during an exorcism. This alerted the german authorities to this medieval insanity, and promptly banned all exorcisms.

To the swiss Catholic Church, being what it is, this was a financial windfall: it allowed them to grow their offices in Grisons to eleven Exorcists after picking up customers from Germany. So what drives their business?

According to Gabriele Amort, president of the international association of exorcists (no kidding, they really do exist), the root cause for the increased sway the Devil has over our pathetic lives are Rock Music (of course), reading Harry Potter (of course), and Yoga.

Wait. Yoga?

I’m constantly amazed by these priests’ ability to keep a straight face while telling outlandish stories to grow their business.

Damn are they good!

Alien Hell

Posted on by

You just have to admire the dogged, willful stupidity of the advanced Creationists. Ok, Ken Ham has built a business around not understanding science; yet he manages to successfully walk the fine line between being a complete idiot and religious businessman.

He now has managed one of humanity’s first: he’s earth’s first antixenoc; he’s the first human who hates aliens (the extra-terrestrial kind) for irrational reasons. So our hat is off to Ken for unlocking the ‘alien hate’ accomplishmnt.

As the Huffington Post reports, Ken states that

You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. […] This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation.

So not even Jesus can save E.T. With that, aliens are even worse off than us uncouth atheists. While we can change our ways, repent, and be welcome to his god’s paradise, all aliens are bound for hell.

Yet it requires some special bravado to come up with Ken Ham Caliber reasoning. All aliens are bound for hell because they are not descendants from Adam and Eve, yet they are affected by original sin. Now, this would usually raise some eyebrows, as intellectual pedestrians like me think that Original Sin applies to all descendants from Adam and Eve. This is because, well, Christianity – when they invented the concept based on Romans 5:12–21, 1 Corinthians 15:22 and Psalm 51:5 – has always maintained that it applies to all descendants of Adam and Eve. It does not, for example, apply to animals. Hence Ken’s assertion that ‘the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe’ is somewhat out of this world. The Bible itself never mentions Original Sin; it’s a construct developed in Lyons during the second century. Perhaps Ken merely forgot to take his meds?

But does Ken really have an alternative to crossing into rational Never-Never Land? Let’s turn the question around. Let’s say SETI is successful, and we contact an alien race. Now, if the benevolent Christian God exists, these aliens will get to heaven because they are not tainted by original sin – they have no blood line (if they even have blood) to Adam and Eve. So aliens get a free pass to heaven, while the humans that God allegedly loves so much must toil all their lives to gain entry.

Now, that would make humans look really, really bad, and definitely puts a dampener on the ‘chosen race’ belief, doesn’t it? So in order to restore the balance, Ken somehow implicates all aliens – who weren’t present at the scene of the crime – as coconspirators. They are now guilty of something humanity did. And somehow, his benevolent and just God would agree with that.

At least Ken has already managed the difficult art of alien logic.

Moral Midget

Posted on by

Turkish deputy PM Bülent Arınç has shown that the qualifications for his current job do not include intelligence. In a public speech during an Eid el-Fitr celebration, he said:

Chastity is of critical importance.

Why? No reason, except that Arınç thinks chastity is an ornament. Why are ornaments of critical importance? Apparently, they just are.

Then he goes completely off the rails

[A woman] will know what is haram and not haram. She will not laugh in public.

Am I the only one who thinks that it does not bode well for your country if your own Number Two Official thinks that half of your country should not be laughing in public? This guy really needs to lighten up.

Now cue the world’s tiniest violin as Arınç continues

Where are our girls, who slightly blush, lower their heads and turn their eyes away when we look at their face, becoming the symbol of chastity

They never existed except in your backward, misogynistic fantasy, Number Two. If women flinch when you look at them it is because they are afraid you’ll hurt them. If that’s what gets your juices flowing, book the next professional submissive who is willing to take you; let women express their joy in any way they damn well please, and expect them to meet your gaze levelly. Anything else is a sign that something is wrong.

Another sign that morals are decaying is, according to moral expert Arinç the fact that

Women give each other meal recipes while speaking on the mobile phone.

Well, I agree that I feel inconvenienced when someone in a tram next to me exchanges a recipe. Truth be told, though, I much prefer that to the average guy who gives a point-by-point account of his latest (and completely made up) conquest. Yet Arınç seems to be OK with that – it’s women who should shut up in public.

When do moral ignoramuses get it that sex, appearance, public expression, and, of all things, open displays of happiness have nothing to do with morals? What is wrong with you?

And this guy was elected?

Good God…?

Serene Killings

Posted on by

Yesterday a convicted murderer was executed in Arizona. Most of the US States still have, and carry out, the death penalty. Most civilized countries, and even Russia, frown upon capital punishment. To them, killing is an act of barbarism. First, there is always the possibility (currently estimated to be as high as 1 per cent) that the convict is not guilty of the crime they are to be killed for. But more importantly, although most perpetrators of crimes deemed fit for capital punishment may deserve to die, it is the defining mark of humanity to not be a savage, to refrain from indulging in the same cruelty as the criminal. A rational argument would also be the fact that capital punishment has never been shown to be a more effective deterrent than incarceration. This only leaves revenge as the main reason for capital punishment – something no ethical person would deem sufficient.

U.S. 9th Circuit Court Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, himself a supporter of the death penalty, shone a harsh and revealing light on a truth that the US would like to ignore. He wrote

Using drugs […] to carry out executions is a misguided effort to mask the brutality of executions by making them look serene and beautiful.

It’s indeed remarkable that the US prefer lethal injections to other forms of execution for one reason only: to make the act of killing look better. Kozinski is the first US official who states it that clearly. In his dissent in the Arizona death penalty case of Joseph Rudolph Wood III, Kozinski put it more aptly than I ever could:

But executions are, in fact, brutal, savage events, and nothing the state tries to do can mask that reality. Nor should we. If we as a society want to carry out executions, we should be willing to face the fact that the state is committing a horrendous brutality on our behalf.

Although personally I find this a rather disquieting argument in support of capital punishment, I can’t help but notice that most of the countries that stoop so low to kill their criminals also revel in that brutality; most execute publicly. To re-quote:

Executions are, in fact, brutal, savage events, and nothing the state tries to do can mask that reality.

Perhaps the US should either own up to the fact that they are primitive savages, or finally come to their senses and stop this barbarism.

The Internet destroys God!

Posted on by

A few days ago, headlines around the world screamed ‘Internet is killing God’! Well, Nietzsche’s knickers in a twist, Batman! Now, it is a slow news week, and click bait is easier to come by than real news. The study the news articles reference speaks a more measured language, and confirms what everyone knows: Increase someone’s knowledge and that will decrease their likelihood to believe stupid things. Phrasing that more carefully, the researchers say that

Internet use is associated with decreased probability of religious affiliation.

This is not at all surprising. Before the internet connected the homes of sparsely-populated regions (for example the US ‘Heartland’ a.k.a. ‘Hick Central’) to civilization, people had no choice but to believe their priests – they had no viable means of independent confirmation. In Palinland, the Bible was the definite authority on law, moral code and science. This has changed.

The internet works as a catalyst for the mind; it’s not the cause for a pandemic of unbelief. We now have vast resources of scientific knowledge, indexed, fully searchable versions of Bible, Quran and other religious texts, and, admittedly, even vaster resources of cat pictures available at our fingertips. Inquisitive minds use this to confirm or, increasingly, disprove millennia-old hate-filled myths. But it still requires an inquisitive mind.

So the headlines have it wrong. It’s not the Internet that destroys God. It’s knowledge that destroys silly superstitions. If, on the other hand, you want to keep your people religious, you must do as the Taliban and Boko Haram do: forbid education and do your worst to subvert knowledge.

That’s where faith-based schools come in.

Trojan Hoax

Posted on by

A great brouhaha has erupted about the fact that faith-based schools are teaching outrageous lies to children.

Really?

I mean – come on! What else do you expect? Did anyone really think that the lies would be limited to scripture? What kind of hypocrite thinks that one lie is different from another? What mental contortions do you have to make to think ‘God hates homosexuals’ and ‘you are lucky to be Muslims and not ignorant like Christians and Jews’ are somehow different?

This is no ‘Trojan Horse‘. Read the Odyssey. If you are morally backward or stupid enough to support faith based schools, don’t feign surprise when the teachers lie to your children. That’s what you pay them for.

Truthiness…

Posted on by

If you know the Ten Commandments, you know this one:

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor

This is, of course, part of Christian doctrine – and if you are to believe the, uh, believers – an absolute. Don’t lie, period. No weaseling around, right?

Well…

What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church… a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.

In light of above reasoning, it should be no wonder if the church got angry at such blatant sophistry. They would rightly denounce it as ‘relativism’, when clear-cut commands are intentionally undermined by smart-assed equivocating, trying to evade the issue. What will the world come to if any half-decent atheistic schmuck with a softcopy of ‘Hitchslapped’ can bang out an excuse for lying?

Except, of course, that above relativistic doublespeak comes from none other than one of Christianity’s (well, the Protestants, anyway) most revered priests: Martin Luther (not Dr. King).

It wasn’t Stephen Colbert who invented ‘truthiness’ – it was Luther; the church has long since mastered it’s use. Colbert only gave it a much deserved name.

Before, it was called quod licet iovi, non licet bovi

Atheists believe!

Posted on by

It’s exploiting a linguistic imprecision Find phone , they know it, and it’s driving me nuts. Ray Comfort and the rest of the lunatic creationist fringe in particular. The word ‘believe’ has two very different meanings, and intellectually dishonest apologists have been mining that particular vein for personal gain.

When a believer states ‘I believe in God’ what they are saying is ‘I have faith that God exists’. It is the first definition of believing: to accept something as fact with no, and sometimes in spite of, evidence.

When someone states ‘I believe (in) evolution’ what they are saying is ‘I have been persuaded by evidence to accept evolution as a valid explanation’. It is the second definition of believing: to accept a statement as true, i.e. after being convinced by evidence and fact.

I believe that most apologist know this. I believe they don’t give a damn.

Now, that wasn’t too hard, was it?

Steeple Power

Posted on by

‘All this science is nothing compared to His grace’, she says as we turn to go.

I glance at the church where she just spent the past two hours, and keep my peace. I’m just happy to see her.

The church’s steeple, though, belies what she just said. At the very top glistened a small but definite testament to the fact that religion has lost to science long ago:

A Lightning Rod.