Another one bites the dust...

And so another one of my relationships ends. Further proof that I am incompatible with most human beings. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Boy Scout Bigotry

The Boy Scouts of America continue to have the position that private bigotry and discrimination shouldn't justifiably come with any social or political costs. They further insist that by discriminating against gays and atheists and by depicting them as morally inferior, they continue to serve the public good.

If the Boy Scouts engaged in similar bigotry and discrimination against other groups like Jews, Hispanics, Catholics, or liberals, there's no way that public agencies or charitable organizations would continue to support or help them. This is because it's generally accepted that discrimination against those groups is harmful; people don't yet quite understand that the same is true about discrimination against gays and atheists.

The Boy Scouts of Religious America, promoting bigotry in a school near you.

Dumbass Floridians

Wake up Florida....here

Pray for me

Religious people say that prayers work, yet when you question them and ask why, like when they prayed for a specific something ("Father, please don't let my father die of cancer"), they say that they're prayers were not answered because it was God's will.
I point out that, if there is a god, and he knew everything in advance, what is the point in begging him to change his mind? The results of prayer are exactly that of random chance.
Look at the story of Jesus Christ, who prayed in the garden that he would be spared, yet this wonderful, forgiving god ignored him. Of course, Jesus Christ, according to the Church, is God (one of The Trinity)...so that makes it even more confusing and illogical.
Jesus Christ, or so we are told, also asked God why he had been forsaken, while he was being crucified. So, God is questioning God...and God couldn't get God to change his mind...but I digress.
The act of praying, although it has a psychological element, makes absolutely no sense. Christians cannot explain it, because it is basically impossible to explain.

I Agree with Mr. Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens

Belief in Belief

A question that interests me very much (and always has) is this: I know that I do not believe in either any god or any religion, and I can give my reasons in a manner that the other side can at least understand, but can the same be said for those who claim that they do believe? A shorter way of putting this is to ask whether our antagonists in this ancient argument truly mean what they appear to say.

The recent disclosure that Mother Teresa had for almost half a century been unable to feel the presence of Christ in the Eucharist or the ear of God listening to her prayers, is of great im­portance here. (See the recent book of her despairing letters, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.) Not even her most fervent admirers regarded this woman in any sense as an intellectual, and she evidently struggled to combat her doubts in a highly traditional way—namely, by making ever-more extravagant and even masochistic professions of “faith.” This would be superb confirmation of Daniel Dennett’s hypothesis about "belief in belief"— the strange idea that, though faith itself may be ludicrous and incoherent, the mere assertion of it may possess some virtues of its own.

Even though I have sometimes described her as a fraud (for her collusion with rich oppressors of the poor like the Duvalier family in Haiti and for her other corrupt dealings), I would now hesitate to put Mother Teresa in the same category as a Falwell, a Haggard, a Sharpton, or a Robertson. These men have never done a day’s real work in their lives and are or were simple parasites who pinch themselves every morning at their good fortune at living the easy life of exploiting the gullible. For them, religion is nothing more than a trade, or a racket.

The same, I think, can be said of the numberless clerics convicted of child-rape (why on earth do we allow ourselves the silly euphemism of “abuse”?). Their foul crime is not one of hypocrisy. No priest who sincerely believed even for ten seconds in divine judgment could conceivably endanger his immortal soul in this way, and those in the hierarchy who helped protect such men from punishment in this world are equally and obviously guilty of a hardened and ob­scene cynicism.

But the racketeering and exploitative side of religion, as with its no-less-mark­ed tendency to generate wars, atro­cities, and repressions, isn’t the whole story. What of those who try their best to help others and lead a decent life, attributing this conduct to their belief in a Virgin, a Prophet, or to the story of Exodus, or any other such fabrication? I never cease to wonder, in dialogues with such people, whether they are really saying what they mean or meaning what they say.

To any humanist, for example, it’s perfectly obvious that the city of Cal­cutta would benefit from an influx of volunteer nurses, doctors, inoculators, sewage experts, and others, just as it would not benefit from the attentions of people who regard poverty and death as a secondhand share in the "mystery" of the Crucifixion. There are actually quite a good number of activists of the first type (I spent some time there once, watch­ing the great Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado do his work for UNICEF documenting the massive campaign for vaccination against polio), but for some weird reason the only person anyone can name is a woman who spent her entire life campaigning against birth control—a stupid campaign that Bengal most definitely did not and does not need.

Is it not possible that the missionaries of "faith" regard the objects of their charity as mere raw material—human subjects for a tortured experiment in their own psyches? It seems that, the more Mother Teresa lost conviction in the teachings of her religion, the more energetically she silenced her doubts by ostentatious crusades against divorce, abortion, and contraception using "the poorest of the poor" as her backdrop and her excuse. And does this not degrade such work as she actually did? For her, the helpless beggar was just that—helpless, to be sure, yet for that reason easily available for her own exhausting propaganda. The case for assisting starving Bengalis is complete on its own terms, but most of the money raised for the "Missionaries of Charity" went—as Mother Teresa herself happily admitted—to the building of convents that were consecrated, in effect, to her own ambition and her own very extreme teaching of Catholic dogma. These preach­ings went dead against the only certain cure for poverty—the emancipation of women from the status and condition of breeding machines—that the human race has ever discovered.

In other words, "faith" is at its most toxic and dangerous point not when it is insincere and hypocritical and corrupt but when it is genuine. At that point, its energy of certainty and self-righteousness can be used, not only to reinforce the Church but also (as Mother Teresa’s continuing reputation demonstrates) to impress even the secular. The evidence now is that this is how she and her confessors squared the circle. Repress your misgivings, overcome your de­spair, re­double your efforts, and we will make you a saint and later claim that you cured the sick even after your death. It’s at this point that the cynical loops round to meet the naïve and say in effect that anything is permissible as long as it keeps the illusion alive. Again, one has to stand amazed before a clergy who can use, as a recruiting sergeant, a wretched old lady whose own faith, as they well knew, had worn to a husk.

Only God can make a tree

Someone once said that only God can make a tree. Probably because it's so hard to get the bark on.

But...what about the dog?

Getting religion...here

7th Commandment

THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT

"Thou shalt not commit adultery" Ex. 20, 14.

The so called 'sexual' commandments had absolutely nothing to do with sexual morality. They were taboos based on the rights of property. Women in this day were owned possessions. Men could sell them or divorce them at will, and this was ok with God. God must have a penis. He was and is not an equal opportunity Supreme Being. I say we vote for a female God the next time.

Ben Stein's Intelligent Design (yes, it rhymes)

In a nutshell, this is why ID should not be considered as anything but religious...

If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. Its advocates bypass normal scientific due process by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and - with great shrewdness - to the government officials they elect.

Period.

Thank The Lord and Pass The Tornado

Once again, tragedy strikes and people thank the Lord (in Virginia)...

"Brenda Williams, 43, returned Tuesday to the shopping center where she was buried beneath a collapsed ceiling in a manicure shop during the storm. She was pulled to safety by a stranger, she said. “I’m not lucky, I’m blessed,” said Williams, who had a 2-inch gash stitched above her left eyebrow and stitches on her right forearm. “I’m fine. I’m here. I’m in the land of the living.”


If I believed in a god, I would wonder why he was fucking with me, not thanking him for dumping a house on me.