Kill Bill

In California, a lawyer has filed the Sodomite Suppression Act, a new bill that will legalize murdering gays

by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.

Since this is California, the bill will go to the signature-gathering stage because under California law, any bill that you introduce will do so – provided that you cough up the USD 200 fee. So Matt McLaughlin thought this was a wise investment, and paid in full.

Somewhat predictably, this caused people to become flustered; some even went so far as to call for McLaughlin being disbarred.

Now I don’t think that submitting a bill, even if it was created from pure, unadulterated hate and mixed with equal amounts of terminal homophobia such as this one, should result in legal action against whomever submitted it. For a number of reasons:

  • progressing the bill is a phenomenal waste of resources, yes. But don’t kill the messenger. The correct response is to change the process, not to punish the person who uses it correctly. If you can submit such an insane bill, something may be wrong with your legal system.
  • that being said, I think it’s also a sign of a healthy trust in your population that you allow whackjobs to submit whacky proposals. Even if we don’t like what’s proposed, at least all proposals are heard. This is actually a good thing.
  • also, I think freedom of speech is more important than silencing an idiot because we don’t like to hear what they want to say. Let them speak freely. That way we also know whom to avoid in the future.
  • this is a another great example to cite when some believers tell you that religion is good for people

And of course, reading the comment section is as entertaining as visiting the local zoo: asks a (presumably devout Christian) believer:

Is this nutter for real?  Sadly, he gives Christians a bad name.  I think he may need to acquaint himself more closely with the teachings in the Bible which are based around love, not discrimination and hatred

Obviously, that commenter, unlike hate-filled Matt McLaughlin, didn’t read the bible.

Muslim Creationism

A few days ago, I found a book in my mail box. It was made from glossy, high-quality paper, some 300 pages thick and titled The Evolution Deceit. Since it’s no secret that I have disdain for pseudo-science, especially when it serves to spread religion, I thought a friend was poking fun at me, giving me a fake book, or a well-made satire. After all, even at a cursory glance, it hits all the wide-eyed creationist highlights and the introduction reads like something straight from The Onion.

[…] the theory of evolution constitutes the underpinning of a deceptive philosophy that has held sway over a large number of people: Materialism.

Now, that is high satire. I mean, come on – claiming that a natural order can become an ideology is funny. I wish I had thought of that.

However, I quickly found out that not only is the book real, it also represents a tragically inept attempt at spreading religion:

  • First, the book is peddling Creationism. Here in Switzerland, levels of education are high, and only a few stubborn half-wits believe in the literacy of ‘God created Adam from clay, and Eve from a rib’. The potential audience for this kind of book, the occasional US ex-pat aside, is minuscle.
  • Then, as I was stunned to discover, the book is selling Islamic Creationism. This is astonishing for the simple fact that unlike Christianity, Islam never had a problem with evolution. So this book first creates a problem where none exists, and then tries to sell Islam by solving a non-existing issue. And if this wasn’t enough, Switzerland is a predominantly Christian country, with very little sympathy for Islam. So if you do find someone stupid enough to believe in creationism, they’d already be a Christian.

If you want to sell that kind of crazy here, I don’t think that you could pick a worse combination than Islam and Creationism – even if you wanted to.

The book itself is pretty much what you’d expect from someone foolish enough to try and use ‘science’ to disprove Evolution: misrepresentation (‘Darwin claimed in Origin of Species that Whales evolved from Bears’), misattributions, false assumptions, misdirection, really bad math (these Creationists sure love miscalculating probability), outright slander (my favorite: ‘Darwin is responsible for Hitler, Nazis and Communism’), allegations of conspiracy against ‘alternative’ science, and of course mountains of suggestive evidence that has been taken out of context. It doesn’t help that the author is also a conspiracy theorist and – this is a first – has both denied and affirmed the Holocaust.

But why am I writing about a deranged, scientifically illiterate or dishonest author who is prepared to lie in order to sell his religion? After all, there are tons of those, and nothing of what he writes is original nor noteworthy.

It’s not so much the fact that yet another scientific ignoramus is sacrificing his integrity on the altar of his imaginary master. It’s this: the book has enormous production values: high quality paper, lots of good photos and illustrations, impeccable layout, and well translated. The production values are higher than most school books I’ve seen recently, and it is distributed for free (I was wrong – no friend dropped off that book; everyone on my block got one as unsolicited mail).

I find it unsettling that someone would spend this amount of money to produce and distribute a book dedicated to undermining knowledge, reason and science. This book undeniably looks and reads better than most academic books I read at university. I’m worried what it could do to a poor community where real science books are difficult to come by and where people have little means to discern science from hateful claptrap.

This book wasn’t written to educate, to better this world and humanity. It’s been written, produced and distributed to prey on unsuspecting people; to infect minds with a divisive, dangerous ideology, disguised as science.

It serves as yet another unwelcome reminder of the fact that there is no evil that fundamental Christians do that Islamists won’t imitate.

Christian Taliban

After praying for the death of President Obama, faithful Christian Pastor Steven Anderson is openly calling for the death of all gay people. In his tiny, hate-filled mind, and supported by the Old Testament (Levicitus 20:18), which, according to Christians all around the world has been superseded by Jesus, Anderson thinks that murdering all gays cures AIDS. In his sermon titled AIDS: the Judgement of God, Anderson pontificates:

And that, my friends, is the cure for AIDS. It was right there in the Bible all along — and they’re out spending billions of dollars in research and testing. It’s curable — right there. Because if you executed the homos like God recommends, you wouldn’t have all this AIDS running rampant.

Well, except of course for the heteros who also suffer from AIDS and who outnumber gays 10:1. But don’t mind them. Because – reasons! And God! Anyway, Anderson’s messages of love are legend. Besides praying for President Obama’s death, Anderson has also railed against women speaking in churches (Anderson is leaving money on the table – the New Testament forbids women to teach), lectured his parish on the lying ways of Jews (he may have channeled Martin Luther’s On the jew and his lies here), and stated that all LGBT people are pedophiles.

I’ve encountered this amount of raging, rampant homophobia only in repressed, closet gays. Let’s hope Anderson recognizes the wrong in his ways and comes out of the closet before he kills himself.

The 90% Minority

The BBC reports that yesterday, in the Punjab province in Pakistan, a couple was killed by an angry mob for blasphemy.

“Yesterday an incident of desecration of the holy Koran took place in the area and today the mob first beat the couple and later set their bodies on fire at a brick kiln,” local police station official Bin Yameen told the AFP news agency.

A security official told the BBC that local police had tried to save the couple, but they were outnumbered and attacked by the angry crowd.

The majority of these people believe that it perfectly all right to barbarically beat two people to death because they may have done something unsavory to a religious book.

I would love to hear Ben Affleck explain why that isn’t a bad idea – or how this local-police-overwhelming mob is a minority.

Moroccan Motherlode

A couple of days ago, a major brouhaha erupted over a remark that Bill Maher and Sam Harris made on Maher’s show Real Time. Maher and Harris contended that the majority of Muslims entertain morally unacceptable beliefs. Ben Affleck, another guest at the show, became hostile, and accused Maher and Harris of being prejudiced and racists.

Yet, they were merely stating a fact, and Affleck seems to have fallen prey to hyper-politically correctness. When you say that the majority of US Republicans is religious and believes that Jesus died on the cross, that is a provable fact. It is also a provable fact that the majority of Muslims believe that the appropriate punishment for apostasy is death. Not a few freaks – the majority. And that is a morally unacceptable tenet.

Yesterday, the Guardian reported the story of a british subject, Ray Cole, who was arrested and illegally detained in Morocco on grounds of being gay.

As Cole recounts:

At the police station, although still not under arrest, Cole knew why they had been taken. “Straight away [there was] the insinuation that we were homosexual,” says Cole, “They said, ‘We’ve got religion here. You’re filth and scum.’ They did their best to humiliate us.”

These homophobes are not fundamentalists – they are everyday (and probably otherwise kind and upstanding) Moroccan citizen. Their problem: they adhere to a deeply homophobic ideology. Our problem: these believers are the majority in Morocco.

[edit Oct-19]
Last Thursday, the Pakistani High court dismissed Aasiya Bibi Noreen’s appeal and upheld her death sentence. Her crime: Blasphemy against Alla. In Pakistan their High Court is convinced that the appropriate punishment for blasphemy is death.

Maher and Harris nailed it. The majority of Muslims hold immoral tenets. It is high time we stop this PC bullshit and look the problem squarely in the face. Stop making allowances where none should be made.

Religion of Restraint

Islamists have shown great restraint a few months ago. After a pamphlet insulting the Prophet was found in one of the 80’000 books housed in a Library, Muslims merely torched the building and, for good measure, shot just one the library workers. Don’t worry, the worker survived, even though he totally deserved death for working in such a morally decadent place.

A death toll of zero after such a egregious, brutal and unprovoked assault on Islam is practically unheard of.

This shows that cooler heads in muslim communities are starting to prevail. We now can hope that within the next few years, women can openly ask for education without being shot at all (the Malala case already proves that in modern muslim countries, women can ask for education without being killed; they are merely shot in the face).

So the religion of peace is now changing into the religion of peace with less killing!

So, good news all around.

Well, except for the few thousand books.

God hates you

Atheists often hear the ridiculous assertion that they hate gods.

But let’s be honest – even if we did, it wouldn’t affect anyone else. If a god can’t take the fact that a mortal hates them – well… On the other hand, there are ample reason to hate gods if they existed.

If you look at the Aceh province of Indonesia, for example, you’ll see a God-given system in effect. And it positively hates humans, women in particular. If you drink alcohol, kiss while not married, skip friday prayer, or – god forbid, literally – engage in anything homosexual, you will receive barbaric, horrendous corporal punishment. There is nothing benevolent about this system; it is pure, unadulterated hatred of anything that those in power deem ‘un-islamic’. And of course it also applies to non-muslims.

If you look at Aceh’s sharia laws, and believe that they are inspired by a God, the conclusion is obvious: God hates humans. Anything that could be fun, happy, or joyful is an affront to that god: music, cinema, driving a motor cycle, or openly showing affection. That god expects everyone to be miserable – and thank him for it. Hating such an unpleasant, blood-thirsty, petty and spiteful God would be a virtue.

The Internet destroys God!

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.

Doing their Wurst

Russian homophobes (which seems to include the Russian Orthodox Church’s leadership) are foaming at the mouth again. The reason? A successful drag queen.

Not being partial to chansons, I wasn’t up-to-date on what was going on in the Eurovision Song Contest. It transpired that Austria’s contribution was presented by artist Tom Neuwirth under her stage name ‘Conchita Wurst’. Her outfit, a beautiful dress, long hair, and stylish beard shook the religious fag haters to their collective core. Even more so the fact that Wurst won the contest.

After calling Wurst an ‘Abomination’, Vladimir Legoyda, chairman of the orthodox church’s information department told Interfax that

the legal and cultural spheres are moving in a parallel direction, to which the results of this competition bear witness.

Actually, while indeed parallel, they move in opposing direction, with the church accelerating fast into the stone age.

Still, as many people have pointed out, it’s not without a little irony that the hate-mongers at the helm of the Russian Orthodox Church are so strongly opposed against men in beautiful dresses wearing beards…

Orthodox drags seventyfive
Beards in Dresses
(Image Source: Twitter)

“Those who cannot remember the past…”

Stupid is as stupid does. And then there is Lehava, an organization that takes stupidity to an all-new level by mixing it with equal amounts of religious hate, intolerance, and an appalling dose of misogyny. They oppose marriages between Jewish women and non-Jewish men. Yep, that’s right: women only, and entirely religiously focused.

Their newest service is a hotline where you can call if you “know a girl who is involved with a goy and you want to help her”.

Chairman of the Lehava organization, Bentzi Gupstein, went on record with this morsel:

every person can explain in his own way to the Arab man that he is better off dating Fatima from the village rather than Yael or Einat

After the success of your hotline, here’s another idea, Bentzi “Adolf” Gupstein:
Why don’t you enforce a law that all non-Jews have to wear stickers: say a yellow Crescent for the Muslims? To keep the bloodlines pure. And the work’s already half done for you – just download of a copy of the Nuremberg Laws. Then first replace all occurrences of ‘Jew’ with ‘Muslim’ or ‘Goy’ [derogatory term for non-Jew], and all occurrences of ‘German Blood’ with ‘Jew’ – and you are done. It’s easy. The concentration camps are a natural second step, and the blueprints for those you can look up all over Israel.

For example in Yad Vashem.