Tag Archives: silly

Priestly dilemma

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Here’s a strange dilemma: Every once in a while I read a report or see a brief video clip of priests from different religions meeting. Of course, I think it is always good when people meet in a friendly way. However, while watching priests smile and greet each other, I can’t help but wonder what they are thinking of the other guy.

After all, if each priest truly believes what they preach their flock, they must be equally confident that their opposite is full of it. In that case, their friendly face is nothing but an empty front; no-one ever agreed to something meaningful while talking to an idiot.

But perhaps these priests have legitimate doubts with regards to their gods and the veracity of their scripture. In this case, a meaningful and intelligent conversation is possible with exponents of other religions that are equally unsure. The problem here is that the priests then go back to their flock and pretend that their faith in gods was absolute.

Of course a third alternative remains: both sides know they are con artists, and afford their opposites all the courtesies of professional charlatans.

Humble Belief?

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You should be more humble.

It’s really convincing when Christians play that card – usually after they humbly assert that their faith is the only true one, that their god created the entire universe, that I’ll be going to hell because I don’t love that god, and that I’m arrogant for not believing their preposterous scripture.

But tell me – who is the humble one here: He who admits that ‘I don’t know if there is a god’ – or the person who states that ‘I know for fact that this is god, and he wants you to exactly do that‘?

Tell me, dear Christian: when was the last time you heard your priest say ‘maybe there is a god’ or ‘perhaps Jesus wants you to love thine neighbor’? I certainly never did when I went to church. All I ever heard were assertions: god did this, said that, performed this miracle, and made people go there. None of that was ever accompanied by a cautionary ‘maybe’ or humble ‘perhaps’. It was always stated as fact. Do you really think being that arrogant qualifies as being humble? Then why are you accusing atheists, who are doing none of the above, as being arrogant?

Ricky Gervais once observed that it is revealing that atheists are never accosted by ‘hateful satanists’ for not believing in their demon. It’s always the ‘loving Christians’ who insult me for not believing in their god.

Because, seemingly, being insulting is the new humble.

Mental Drivers

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In Russia, you now can’t drive a car if you are a ‘sexual deviant’. In Russia, that of course includes being LGBT. The ‘reason’ behind this is that being sexually deviant (e.g. gay) is classified as a mental disorder, and people with mental disorders are banned from driving to make the road safer.

Of course, obvious mental disorders – like the delusion that there is a god that watches your every move – do not bar you from driving.

Only in Russia.

Of Unicorns

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Many Christians are somewhat irritated when atheists bring up Unicorns. Atheists do that mostly to show that in general, logic can’t prove a negative: the fact that atheists can’t disprove god’s existence is not proof of his existence; the way to show this to the believer is to ask them to disprove the existence of unicorns.

Because everyone knows that unicorns don’t exist.

Except that Isaiah 34:7 does mention unicorns.

Well, believers usually don’t know that fact either.

Known Unknowns

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One thing surely is funny. When you meet a believer, they always profess to know exactly what their god wants. They not only are absolutely sure that god exists, they also know what and how he or she thinks. By strange coincidence, what god wants is also always exactly what the believer wants. The believer can tell you this on good authority because, having a personal relationship with god, they have gained insight into how god thinks.

But when you ask a reasonable, perhaps even obvious, question, the narrative changes dramatically. Ask, for example, why so many children starve today, and god suddenly becomes mysterious. At that point, the believer doesn’t know what god wants or why he does it, and flatly states that no-one could ever know.

Yet that changes nothing.

You still should do what the believer wants you to do

Commie Constitution

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Everyone’s favorite right-wingnut Rick Santorum, on his way to establish a christian theocracy in the USA, went on record in a conference call with this:

The word ‘separation of church and state’ is not in the U.S. Constitution, but it was in the constitution of the former Soviet Union.

Oh, those godless commie bastards! First, separation of church and state is not one, but five words. But that’s immaterial. In truly Monty Pythonesque manner Rick has proven before that he can’t be trusted to be able to count to three, much less above that exalted number. Five is right out.

Surprisingly, Rick, you are right – to a point: the US Constitution uses the words ‘wall of separation between church and state’ instead – in the First Amendment. For someone who allegedly wants to protect the Constitution, Santorum shows a remarkable lack of knowledge about what’s actually in it.

Well, in that he’s on par with most of his fellow devout Christians who profess to live by the Bible, yet have no idea of what it contains.

Stone-age dumb?

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Every once in a while, I hear someone off-handedly making a disparaging comment, referring to someone who seems to behave stupidly as a ‘cave man’. It regularly comes up in a heated debate between believers and non-believers, when the non-believer, losing their cool, tells the religious person she is a ‘bronze age person’.

In this context, the intention is clear: the atheist believes the other person to be stupid, hence the bronze age epithet. However, I think that is phenomenally unjust – to the bronze age people. People at that time were as intelligent and smart as we were today. They lacked knowledge, so some of the things they did may seem stupid to us, but were actually results of brilliant reasoning. If you somehow could time-travel a toddler from 12’000 years ago into present day, and she then grew up with modern kids, you wouldn’t be able to a difference between the teen- and the stone-ager.

What infuriates the atheist to the point they resort to ad-hominems is that in stark contrast to the people who lived twelve thousand years ago, modern people have access to knowledge. Religious people choose to be ignorant; some of their actions are willfully stupid. Calling them cave-men is a complete uncalled-for insult to the memory of those brave hunter-gatherers.

Islamsplainin’

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Sigh. If the cause weren’t so tragic, it would be high comedy: in the UK, Christian politicians are sniping at each other over the question who is the better Muslim. It’s like men explaining what women really think. So we have a veritable feast of Islamsplainin’ going on.

This particular incident, it seems, began when devout Christian and UK Premier David Cameron officially stated that the grisly murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby by fanatical muslims was a betrayal of Islam and of Britain’s Muslim communities.

Strangely, no-one cared about the fact that Cameron’s statement blatantly missed the point: the murder of anyone is a crass betrayal of human values; anything after that is only small fry; nobody gives a dam if it also betrays the values of the spotted owl society, or, for that matter, those of a religion.

Showing little wisdom (and no taste at all by trying to make political hay out of a murder), Lord Pearson of Rannoch took exception with Cameron’s silly statement – of course for all the wrong reasons. As the Guardian reports, the Lord thundered in feigned reighteousness

My lords, are the government aware that Fusilier Rigby’s murderers quoted 22 verses of the Qur’an to justify their atrocity? Therefore, is the prime minister accurate or helpful when he describes it as a betrayal of Islam?

Now, Lord Pearson, himself a Christian, deliberately overlooks the fact that his own scripture is overflowing with blood. I hate to quote your own book, Pearson:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

(and when is say hate I mean I really enjoy doing that)

Of course, it only took little time for the discussion to deteriorate into mud-slinging. Hilarity ensued when both sides of the house started calling each other the non-word of the century: Islamophobe. That word’s definition still is

A word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons

as it was so aptly summarized by Andrew Cummins. It’s a sure sign that you have lost the argument if you need to resort to that term.

The absurdity of the discussion is highlighted by the following megaton of stupidity, delivered free of charge by a UKIP spokesman:

Lord Pearson […] is talking about how Islamic scholars are constrained by the comprehension that the Qur’an is the perfect word of God unencumbered by human frailty, unlike the Bible. In contrast the apostles are human and like all human things are prone to error.

Which is of course news to the majority of Christians to whom the bible is the perfect word of God, not to mention believe in the pope’s inerrancy. Yeah, ‘my scripture beats your scripture’ has always been the most convincing argument evah!

The biggest joke: these Bozos run your country.

It’s his nature

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After retroactively discovering the Americas for the glory of Islam, Turkey’s number one nutcase has again said something profound. Profoundly stupid, that is.

Never one who runs the risk of being mistaken for a feminist, Erdoğan took the opportunity to prove once and for all that he’s a world-class jerk when it comes to women’s rights. Slapping his international audience for women’s rights and freedom across the face, the premier intoned rather tone-deaf:

“You cannot make women and men equal; this is against nature. […] What women need is to be able to be equivalent, rather than equal.”

Now that is not only jaw-droppingly stupid, it’s also on par for what we expect from a fundamental religionist. His sophistry betrays the immoral thinking many religions are built upon. Bible, Torah and Quran already have woman’s equivalency with men: In the Quran, four women are equivalent to one man, in the Torah and Bible, she is equivalent to 3/5 of a man. Equivalency is not Equality. This is taught in elementary school nowadays. It’s inconceivable that Erdoğan doesn’t know this.

Now, hidden deep down in his speech, the premier does say that women should have the same rights as men. But it’s buried under a veritable landslide of patriarchic unreason, stone-age mentality, and long stretches of void that elaborate the obvious: yes, women and men are physically different. Bravo. It’s good to know that Turkey’s leadership has clued in to this surprising fact.

Instead of saying things that are obvious yet can easily be misrepresented by misogynists to justify their actions, Erdogan should stop being an ass and acknowledge openly, and in a straightforward manner what should be front and center to every ethical being: that even though men and woman are different, they must have the same rights and freedoms.

Then again, Erdoğan can’t help himself. Saying something intelligent, so it would seem, is against his nature.

Erdoğan’s America

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Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – not particularly known for his intelligence – wants to set the record straight. As the Guardian and other outlets report, Erdoğan maintains that muslim sailors reached the Americas more than 300 years before Christopher Columbus did:

Muslim sailors reached the American continent 314 years before Columbus, in 1178

More interesting than the question whether this is true, though, is the question why anyone would want to say something like this. So some people say that Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas. But is this really something to be proud of considering the fact that

  • Columbus’ (re)discovery ultimately led to immense suffering and death – the indigenous population was almost wiped out both intentionally and accidentally. Why would you want to claim responsibility for that? Even US Americans are finally clueing in to the fact that celebrating Columbus Day is like celebrating the Huns’ arrival at the Gates of Rome.
  • Why is the religion of the discoverer relevant? If you do want to put your God in the spotlight this way, you’ll have to explain why so many more discoveries were made outside your religion. 
  • It’s common knowledge that the Vikings made multiple landfalls on the american continent before 1000 AD; the Polynesians very likely reached South America more than 1500 years before the first Northmen set foot on Newfoundland – yet you don’t see either of them running around trumpeting that fact. Why would they?
  • More to the point, the original discoverers of the Americas are the indigenous people that the Johnny Come-Latelys killed: the Americas were originally settled 16’000 – 20’000 years ago, most probably via a land bridge from Asia. They almost certainly were superstitious, but they definitely didn’t adhere to Islam, Christianity or any other religion we know today. 

If there is one thing I wouldn’t obsess about is the question who really discovered the Americas and what deities they believed in.

So what can we learn about this silly claim?

If you feel that your religion has some kind of penis envy versus some other religion and that you must stake a claim for your religion, make sure it’s about something worthwhile.