The persecution of Christians

It was inevitable. As we all know, Christians are persecuted – just like UK’s ‘Voice of Justice’ Lynda Rose lamented after her miserable appearance on BBC’s ‘Big Question’. That statement raised some eyebrows, so here are some concrete examples from the past three months:

  • In Greece, a man was sentenced to 10 month in prison for Blasphemy after poking fun at a priest on Facebook
  • Students wearing T-Shirts adorned with a page from the ‘Jesus and Mo’ cartoon were threatened to be expelled from campus if they didn’t cover their T-shirts
  • A picture showing the ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’ superimposed on the ‘Creation of Adam’ painting was forcibly removed from a booth at a student fair
  • A student group was kicked off-campus for naming a pineapple ‘Mohammed’

Oh, wait. That’s the Christians persecuting atheists.

“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.

Morans pray for Earthquake

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

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?

Mormon video takes shot at the Oscars

It’s time for the Oscars again, and we are anxiously awaiting the nominations. In the category “nice sentiment, bad execution” the mormon church scored particularly high. They published a video that encourages doing the right thing: when you see a friend with problems, you should try to help. So far, so good.

But in their ‘Wounded On The Battlefield’ video, the mormon church chose, of all things, addiction to pornography as the affliction that needed immediate attention. Now, addiction to anything is indeed bad – but pornography? There are far worse addictions, with far grater consequences that are much, much more common: alcohol, tobacco, drugs. The message, even if well-intentioned, gets muddled by the presentation. Like so many Christian-derived religions, Mormonism is obsessively preoccupied with sex, and this neurotic obsession completely overshadows any deeper meaning. All that remains after watching the video is the impression that Mormons are an uptight, sexually dysfunctional bunch that want you to go to church instead of watching porn. Which is probably not the message they wanted to get across.

And then there is a glaring disconnect with reality: far more people are addicted to religion, with much direr consequences to their families and themselves than those who are addicted to watching porn. It’s obvious that the video’s creators didn’t think of that.

The Mormons, it seems, can’t get out of the woods because they don’t know they are in it.

Experience vs. Learnings

In an interview, Swiss National Councilwoman Barbara Schmid-Federer commented on her religious views:

As a child I experienced first hand what it means to be a member of the catholic minority in the reformed city of Zürich. That is why today I’m committed to supporting religious minorities. [translation: cf]

Aww, too bad. So close, but still a miss. Barbara did experience religious discrimination, but didn’t learn anything from it. Minorities of all kinds need support, no doubt. Yet, the reason for her past discrimination wasn’t the fact that she belonged to a religious minority – it was religion itself. Had she learned from her experience, she wouldn’t fight the symptoms. She’d fight the cause: religious indoctrination and intolerance.

The Go(o)d Tax?

Only two things are certain: death and taxes. In Switzerland, this is also true for companies. Nothing new here. Also not surprising for a highly efficient and organized country, Switzerland’s churches are financed via Church tax (a more apt name would be ‘God Tax’).

An interesting wrinkle is that this tax also applies to companies. This is interesting because – perhaps to my superficial understanding – taxes are levied to pay for some kind of communal service: say roads, or infrastructure in general. The service that Churches provide are, well, special. They provide a service for your soul: redemption, but only if you believe that. So anyone in Switzerland can refuse to pay Church tax on grounds that they don’t believe in gods.

Unlike companies – they are forced to pay Church tax no matter what. Which is no small matter: the taxes collected from companies in the Canton Grisons (Graubünden), for example, make up 90% of the Catholic church’s total income. Now, nobody has ever accused a company of having a soul, or of being religious. The service rendered to companies in return for Church tax is, therefore, zero. Or when was the last time you shared a pew with a company?

And so, in swiss democratic tradition, the people of Grisons will vote on February 9th to decide if this taxation law is going to be changed. Not very surprisingly, the church is opposing the proposal, and is campaigning heavily against it – with a budget ten times (almost literally: $110’00 vs. $15’000) of that from the proponents. You’d not be the first to note a ‘David vs. Goliath’ situation.

In church tradition, the campaign is funded via Church tax. This means that in this case, the companies are forced to fund a campaign against their own interest. By the church. Whose services they can’t, by definition, use.

Because the Church, lest we forget, has the moral high ground.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition…

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.

Rev McClung’s speech (abridged)

Yesterday I commented on Rev Brian McClung’s protest against Reduced Shakespeare Company’s play The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged). The kerfuffle caused by the protest – not to mention the city council’s ill-advised attempt to ban the play – caused the performances to be sold out during their first days. Or, as the good reverend sees it:

Rev McClung described it as “perverse human nature” that the play had sold so many tickets since opposition was raised.

And so McClung took a stand, made his voice heard, electrified the crowd with his righteous defense of the honor of God’s word, and made sure that –

Police maintained a small presence but left before the play began.

Ouch.