Tag Archives: stupid

Thor’s Redoubt

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As part of a regular review, the UN looked at how Norway complies with Human Rights.

Before we look at the results, we must look at the Jury. The team that investigated Norway includes Saudi Arabia (whose King is on record – in front of the UN – stating that Human Rights are alien to him). Unsurprisingly, the UN’s decision to include the Saudis (along with Russia and China) in the UNHR panel has come to bite it in the behind:

As the Independent reports, Saudi Arabia accused Norway of endangering the religious rights of their muslim citizens. They

called for all criticism of religion and of prophet Mohammed to be made illegal in Norway.

This happens when the Jury doesn’t understand the Law they are supposed to uphold. If you don’t know jack about Human Rights you should not preside over its implementation. Making criticism of Religion illegal infringes on the Human Right of Free Speech and Freedom of Religion. Freedom of Religion includes the the right of Freedom from religion. If you suddenly have to observe a particular religion’s rule of blasphemy, you are forced into that religion’s rule set. After all, the Vikings once believed in Odin and Thor. Implementing the idiotic Saudi recommendation would mean banning blockbuster movies like ‘Thor’ or ‘The Avengers’ for blasphemy in Norway.

It is now official that the Saudis do not understand basic Human Rights.

Norwegian Foreign Minister Børge Brende remarked before the hearing that

It is a paradox that countries which do not support fundamental human rights have influence on the council

It’s not paradox. It’s downright stupid.

Not even a smidgen

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You can’t make this stuff up. Ever since former US Vice President Candidate Sarah Palin wrote ‘Good Tidings and Great Joy’, the debate was if her IQ read-out was high enough to qualify as a decent earthquake; mixing her fundamental gun-toting beliefs with equally fundamental Christianity caused some unease among the faithful and gave rise to legitimate questions with regards to her skills of reason.

Two days ago, at the NRA’s national annual convention, Palin said

Enemies, who would utterly annihilate America, they who’d obviously have information on plots, to carry out jihad. [sorry, that’s the transcript – CF] Oh, but you can’t offend them, can’t make them feel uncomfortable – not even a smidgen.

Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we’d baptize terrorists.

To their credit – and unlike the crowd at the convention – some Christians in the US weren’t too amused. After all, waterboarding is torture, and linking torture to the one ritual that defines Christianity does go against the grain of those who purport to believe in a religion of love.

Well, I guess the incident settles one issue: that of Palin’s intelligence. There is none.

Not even a smidgen

A Muslima’s civil courage

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The world’s only voluntary muslima is at it again. Not understanding anything about reality (dead give-away: she likes wearing, and defending, the Burqa), in an open letter posted on a swiss salafist web site, Nora Illi praises the act of two European teenage girls (aged 15 and 16) who have gone to Syria to become Jihadists as ‘an act of civil courage’.

Yet even Illi admits that the only way these women can join the jihad is by marrying a fighter. The west may deride this as ‘sex jihad’, but the fact is that the epithet fits: these women aren’t welcome as fighters, only as sex toys. That’s how Illi views female empowerment. Pathetic.

It gets worse. Let’s say you are a woman, and you are both courageous and stupid enough to give up your freedom, integrity and everything you are to become a freedom fighter’s entertainment. Illi states that these women are doing it as a testament to their faith. Bull. In Syria, both sides are Muslims, and have therefore equal right to claim that God is on their side.

There is nothing courageous nor morally sound in this tragic affair. These girls went to a different country to wage war. Ethically this is always wrong. Becoming a mercenary has no moral defense. That’s why they try to dress it up it as ‘Jihad’.

So why did these girls go? Because they are frigging stupid, and very young. Having no idea what they are getting themselves into, they probably have read too much of female teen drama ‘Divergent‘, hoping to find a green-eyed rebel leader with whom they save the world before supper.

Unfortunately, the truth is that they have wasted their lives. Should they be lucky enough to survive, they’ll return as property (wives) of someone they don’t know. And if they return, they will be immediately seized and dragged before a court. They did break international law, after all, and stupidity never has been a good defense. The reason Illi doesn’t know this is because she never stood before a judge.

Civil courage my ass.

Christian Punch Line

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Like shooting fish in a barrel.

A new documentary about Christian Mixed Martial Arts Fighting (a.k.a. Cage Fight) is making it’s round, aptly called ‘Fight Church’.
Lets see…

‘Turn the other cheek’ – Jesus
‘I want you to kick me as hard as you can!’ Jesus II – the Revenge?

Now, you may be a fan of MMA, dislike it, or ignore it. That’s not the point. It’s training fighters that makes proselytizing a religion of love a hard sell. Anyway, the trailer is a treasure trove of fun.

A self-righteous believer enthuses 

this is a battlefield. We need to charge them – not wait for them to come to us.

Hello? What battlefield? Who is ‘them’? Does he think that Atheists are after his blood? Or is he just spoiling for a fight with other religions? No. This pathetic Milquetoast is frustrated that his faith is being ridiculed, and hopes that someone else beats the crap out of smug Atheists – for Jesus! So now they are ‘toughening up their boys’ to ‘make these problems go away’. 

In other words: Praise the Lord, or I’ll melt your face.

While prepping a child for a fight, a priest pontificates

God said “don’t be afraid, don’t be discouraged, because I am your God, and I’ll be with you wherever you are.”

Perhaps. But he also said stuff like ‘Love thy neighbour’ and ‘turn the other cheek’. It seems that testosterone and the testaments make strange bedfellows; multiple blows to the head do the rest. How else can you explain the fact that these ‘christian fighters’ quote the bible as saying that homosexually is a sin – only to ignore what’s said just three verses further down, when god says the same about tattoos, and another couple of verses later proscribes the death penalty for wearing garments made from two kinds of thread?

Well, it’s brawn over brains. Why else would they be stupid enough to thank god for winning a fight?

When Creationists speak…

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You know, talking with Pentecostals is already strange; it feels like talking to someone over a cell phone with bad reception. Talking to New Earth Creationists, however, is the intellectual equivalent of an out-of-body experience: Surreal. A recent video on youtube shows excerpts from HBO’s documentation ‘Questioning Darwin’.

It begins with Pastor Peter LaRuffa

‘If the bible said that two plus two equals five, I wouldn’t question it – I would believe it, accept it as true, and then do my best to work it out and understand it’

Again, that’s a pastor talking. The video is an impressive document that shows how unquestioning faith, willful ignorance, and stubborn self-righteousness can make you dangerously out of touch with reality: these people know the (scientifically) correct answers, they even quote them, but then take a step into la-la-land to assert the most disingenuous, stupid and narrow-minded fantasy as the truth.

Dr. Charles Bonner (obviously not a scientific degree)

“To put man down as just an animal […] is totally preposterous. God made us in His image. […] Are you saying God is nothing more than an animal?”

The rhetoric question Bonner poses illustrates that he not only completely missed the boat, but showed up at the airport instead. Darwin must be wrong because Bonner thinks he himself looks like a god? If you watch the video, you’d see how even god would object to that.

Angel Dague:

“I just can’t fathom it. [Evolution] just sounds crazy to me”.

… because making the first human from clay, and the second from a rib of the first doesn’t? This is the caliber of thinking we are dealing with here. Then again, Angel burned her brain with drugs during her youth, so we’ll cut her some slack.

So let’s examine this Creationist’s analysis:

“If that’s the way the world works […] then you believe in a God that doesn’t intervene in nature. That takes away any possibility of miracles, any possibility of answered prayer, or any possibility of the resurrection. In reality, you take away the possibility of Christianity to be true at all”

Spot on! Unfortunately, this was meant as an argument against Darwin.

I recommend you watch the video. See how people over and over say “if [some basic truth] was true, then that would mean that God doesn’t exist”, only to conclude “I don’t like it, so I don’t believe it”.

An interesting study of how wishful thinking replaces rational thought. I feel sorry for these people.

Religious food rules

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In Switzerland, the federal council just decreed that insects are not a food group, and thus can’t be sold as food. As insects are an established food source for millions of people, this decision has probably more to do with personal preferences than anything else. Or was it perhaps religion? Possible, but unlikely in Switzerland.

Yet, some religions do have dietary laws. For example, neither Jews nor Muslims must eat Pork. Arguably, some of these rules made sense at the time and context they were passed. For example, the Jewish rule to forbid lobster or shrimp can be read as a cautionary tale: meat from these animals spoils quickly, and not eating it can prevent some severe illness. Most Jews and Moslems at the time lived in hot countries, where the temperature significantly shortens the time until food goes bad. Also, high temperature favors infections, so adhering to the dietary laws increased your chance to survive; at the time they were good rules.

Today, these laws are completely irrelevant: we know about infections, and refrigeration technology allows us to keep meat fresh for a long time irrespective of the weather and temperature outside. Whoever still adheres to kosher or halal diets does so either in ignorance of their origins, or out of tradition.

Or, of course, for religious reasons: because your God said so. In this case, though, you’ll also have to contend with the fact that the god who gave you these rules did so simply because he was too cheap or ignorant to spring for the refrigeration- and hygiene know-how. So which isn’t he: ‘all-knowing’ or ‘loving’?

Sssssnake Oil!

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Ah, faith healing. And dumb-as-doornail Pentecostals. They make good examples of how evolution works: if you are too stupid to stay alive, it’s curtains.

What happened? Pastor Jamie Coots was known for his ‘Snake Salvation’ church services. In it, he used snakes to demonstrate his faith, and to promote faith healing. Like so many other idiots, he believed that faith could suspend the laws of nature.

He believed a passage in the Bible suggests that church members cannot be harmed by venomous snakebites as long as they were anointed by God,

The foundation of his belief: the Gospel of Mark 16:17-18

17 And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues;

18 They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Guess what? It doesn’t work. The sick don’t recover, and snakes are dangerous. Coots was bitten by one of his snakes, refused treatment from paramedics, and died from the venom. His death is tragic, agreed. On the other hand, people like the late Pastor persuade others to refuse medical treatment in favor of ‘faith healing’. There is some poetry here, just not the inspiring kind.

At least Coots didn’t die in vain: he gave tangible proof that his belief was dangerous bullshit.

Morans pray for Earthquake

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As Reuters reports, a group of extremist Islamists has called upon all muslims to pray for an earthquake in Sochi to kill everyone and ruin the ‘games of the atheists and pagans’.

A couple of things. First, to quote Ambrose Bierce:

PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy

Praying never accomplished anything, and won’t help here. Then again, I much prefer an extremist wasting his time on prayer than spend his time wasting people, so maybe in this case, praying does accomplish something.

But is praying for a calamity to befall, and kill, scores of people just harmless idiocy? After all we know that praying won’t change a thing. No, it’s not harmless. Unfortunately, intent does matter. And for all intent and purposes, these Islamists believe they have their hands on a weapon of mass distruction: Allah. And they want to use it.

If Allah did create an earthquake that hit Sochi, it would end the lives of hundreds, if not thousands people, many of them innocent. This callous disregard of human life permeates the belief of whoever prays for earthquakes. A belief, we should remind ourselves, that their practitioners call the ‘religion of peace’.

If you are religious, pray thanks to your god that these extremists are really, really stupid.

… you moran!

Moran3

(Image credit: St. Louis Indymedia Center)

 

On-Line Exorcism

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For some people, no low is too low. Preying on the weak-minded, desperate or possibly schizophrenic, ‘Reverend’ Bob Larson has a business model that is difficult to be less moral: as CNN reports, he exorcises demons (speciality: gay demons), and now offers his services digitally via Skype. For $295 an hour, you can have your demons exorcised on-line. No word on the required bandwidth.

I guess the ‘good’ reverend thought that if he can sell the existence of demons to his flock, he can also sell it online. And why not? So do fortune tellers and seers. Opportunities abound on-line, and to quote David Hannum, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’. Gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘wire fraud’, doesn’t it?

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition…

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Fundamental believers seem to love to take it upon themselves to ‘defend the honor’ of their gods. Unfortunately, some use violence, while others use peaceful means of protest. None use intelligence, though, as an omnipotent being doesn’t need defending.

In the peaceful protest category we have Rev Brian McClung’s (whom I’ve already commented on the last couple of days). His tragicomic tilting at windmills reminds me of a similar quixotic case of protest against Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Initially, it was banned in Ireland (where McClung lives) and Norway – for Blasphemy. Monty Python responded by changing the tagline to ‘so funny that it was banned in Norway’

Fundamental Christians picketed the movie theaters to protest. As a response, interest in the movie spiked, making the movie an international commercial success.

Look how silly you look today if you were one of the protesters then.

Not to mention the fact that ‘Always look at the bright side if life’, the movie’s closing theme, was performed live to a worldwide audience at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

Yeah, that silly.