It’s a frequent tactic of theists to post video “refutations” of atheism to YouTube but to either turn off comments altogether or so systematically delete any rebuttal that didn’t share their viewpoint.
The video you’re about to watch was one of those, but thanks to a new service called BubblePly, I was able to create a point-by-point “live” reply!
(It’s my first attempt at pop-up video, so forgive me if there are quality/timing issues)
The cracker controversy goes on. Though PZ Myers has received multiple death threats over his stated intention to desecrate a wafer, it’s apparently the Catholics who fear for their lives – so much so that Bill Donohue and his Catholic League have felt the need to ask for increased security at the upcoming Republican convention to defend them from those “hysterical atheists”. Apparently atheists’ inability to grasp the obviousness of the bread-product-to-sacred-meat transformation is a sign of violent, unpredictable personalities.
It’s absurd, of course, to expect some sort of atheist-vs-catholic pogroms to break out at a political convention. But, really, I have no problem with the idea of beefing up security. In fact, I think every single attendee at that particular gathering should have his or her own dedicated team of highly paid professional bodyguards… because every dollar they spend on paranoia is a dollar they don’t spend on their election campaigns.
I wonder if the domain name “ChristOnACracker.com” is taken? It could become a Jesus-recipe swap site – I’ll post my Broccoli Savior Casserole! I also wonder at what point during the digestive process the transubtantiation happens. If a low carb dieter, for instance, was to toss down a handful of properly blessed Eucharists, would they turn to meat in time to avoid spiking the eater’s blood sugar? And should there be a “Before/After” type nutritional label to go with those things? I mean, how is anybody supposed to know how many grams of protein and fat are in a single serving of Jesus?
Jeremy Hall, a two-tour Iraq veteran, was raised as a baptist. But somewhere along the way, he outgrew the fairy tales of his youth and became an atheist.
That’s where his troubles allegedly began. It seems that many of his comrades-in-arms and the officers he served under didn’t care for his lack of belief.
When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.
But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.
Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.
This and other incidents lead Hall to file suit against the army in March for discrimination on lack-of-religious grounds. This is of course not the first recent controversy over religion in the military; the generals who made a commercial in the Pentagon for a Christian group spring to mind, and accusations of evangelists running the show have come out of both West Point and the Air Force Academy. (Though, to be fair, the law suit at the Air Force Academy was thrown out in part because the plaintiffs failed to provide information on any specific instance of discrimination.)
But there are certainly groups within the military who are openly pushing for strength through mythology:
the Officers’ Christian Fellowship, has representatives on nearly all military bases worldwide. Its vision, which is spelled out on the organization’s Web site, reads, “A spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform empowered by the Holy Spirit.”
Mike Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, says that his organization has heard thousands of complaints from soldiers who feel they’ve had religious beliefs pushed on them from within the structure of the military. Weinstein’s summary of the goals of the OCF and its ilk is chilling:
“Their purpose is to have Christian officers exercise Biblical leadership to raise up a godly army,” he says.
So to every theist out there who uses the phrase “militant atheist” to describe non-believers who speak out about their non-belief, I send this message:
Stop it. For your own good. Because if there is magical deity up there in the sky and he/she/it is as just and fair as you seem to think, there’s likely a lightning bolt headed your way as punishment for the sin of hypocrisy.
Catholics worldwide are apparently up in arms about a guy trying to walk out of a church with an uneaten communion wafer. And while it’s not even clear what his motivation was for doing so, it hasn’t stopped the death threats from rolling in. As summarized by PZ Myers over at Pharyngula, after evading attempts to physically wrest the God-cookie from him, Webster Cook has been accused of a hate crime, his actions compared to kidnapping by one priest.
Sometimes I wish I had my own news show (I’d call it somethng like WTF?TV) to cover stories like this. Here’s how the talking head on my station would read this news:
Blasphemy or a simple search for steak sauce? That’s the question being debated tonight after UCF student Webster Cook fought his way through a throng of worshipers to carry off a poor, defenseless bit of transubstantiated Savior-flesh.
Church spokesman His Holiness Reverend Father Cardinal Bishop Patsy O’Nambla, himself no stranger to oral consumption of small bits of male meat, had this to say about the incident:
“I just don’t understand what would motivate a person to do something like this. I mean, here we are in the middle of our ritual cannibalistic devouring of the flesh of the big guy on the stick, and this kid decides to leave church property without finishing his portion? What is this guy, crazy or something?”
Said Cook, in his defense:
“I really didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just that… well… the eucharist is kind of bland, and I like my Jesus-loin with a little bit of Wooshter-… Worstecesterer-… Worchest-… uh, some A1. Was going to come back and eat Jesus, I swear! I guess from now on maybe I’d bring a little plastic bag with some seasonings to avoid this kind of mix-up in the future. ”
In related news, Catholic League president Bill Donohue’s head exploded today on national television. Again.
A while back I applauded Iowa Senator Charles Grassley for his probe into the finances of several prominent televangelists.
There’s been little other news of this effort because it is proceeding, one would assume, at the usual glacial governmental pace; but this piece of news did come out recently:
Four of the ministers have since complied with the probe, but Rev. Kenneth Copeland, whose congregation recently bought him a $20 million private jet to preach the gospel, is holding out against the inquiry, which he claims is “aimed at publicly questioning the religious beliefs of the targeted churches.”
“It’s not yours, it’s God’s, and you’re not going to get it,” Copeland says of his financial records. He has launched a website to publicize his crusade and has received support from several leading conservatives, including Paul Weyrich and Kenneth Blackwell.
Okay, so it’s God’s money, and therefore the items you bought with it are God’s as well. He must be a really generous guy to keep letting you borrow his stuff.
Now, I’m not going to pretend to know more about this “God” person than the Reverend, who obviously knows him well enough that they travel together. But from what I remember reading about him years ago, I’m pretty convinced of one thing: he doesn’t need a plane to get around.
Ah, well, I suppose we can just say He invests in mysterious ways and move on to some praying and passing of the collection plate.
I’ve decided to end the “This Week in Fundamentalism” series; it was turning into a sort-of-weekly regurgitation of news that was old (by internet standards) by the time I got around to mentioning it. That, and having to mentally sort through that much concentrated stupidity and/or just plain evil every week was something I got tired of rather quickly. (I defy anyone to read about, for instance, the Czech cultist who allowed her children to be tortured on camera, without experiencing an unpleasant rise in blood pressure…)
Instead I’ll stick to commenting on individual stories as they come along, and hopefully the lack of something I consider a weekly obligation won’t send me back to my previous habit of posting less than once a month.
In speaking to a liberal Christian group in 2006, Obama made the simple point that even among Christians there is hardly agreement on what is the correct interpretation of the Bible:
“Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?” Obama said. “Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?”
Apparently Focus On Family’s James Dobson knows for sure what every passage in the Bible is supposed to mean, because on the basis of that speech he’s accused Obama of “distorting the Bible“.
Says Jimmy D (not to be confused with Jimmy Dean, the sausage guy):
“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said.
“… He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”
So pointing out that there are many possible meanings to biblical passages and then citing a few examples where there is frequent disagreement is tantamount to deliberate distortion? Or is Jimmy D (not that I have anything against sausage) just throwing a radio-broadcast temper tantrum and shouting “My distortions are better than your distortions!”
Because the larger issue here – and both Dobson and Obama need to have this scribed into some holy book so maybe they’ll start to believe it – is that any interpretation of the Bible as anything other than a collection of fairy tales devised by people who got bored with the old fairy tales is a distortion – a distortion of reality. Lending it any credence beyond what’s due to a mixed-message collection of Aesop’s Fables is a distortion of reason.
So, in conclusion, the best breakfast ever is an omelet with some sage sausage, crumbled up bacon, and the cheese of your choice. Mmmm, that’s good eatin’.
The Catholic Church has a long history of warring against the infidel (especially if there’s plunder to be had), and even the modern Church has men on call day or night for when a demon needs exorcising. But there’s one facet of evil that starts the Pope quaking in his golden bunny-slippers: Fiction. Tell a story that involves the Church or an analogous institution and paints it in a less-than-perfect light, and suddenly the Catholic League is up in arms.
They ranted about the DaVinci Code movie, but that was nothing compared to their apoplexy over The Golden Compass. Here was a story written by a man who was (gasp!) openly atheist, and portrayed a too-powerful, corrupt religious organization at odds with the forces of reason.
Their most recent fit, and the inspiration for this entry, is the reaction to “Angels and Demons”, a new film based on a book by DaVinci Code author Dan Brown. They’re worried that a church might be used in the making of this new piece of blasphemy, and so:
The Vatican has banned the makers of a prequel to The Da Vinci Code from filming in its grounds or any church in Rome, describing the work as “an offence against God”.
Angels and Demons, the latest Dan Brown thriller to be turned into a film, includes key episodes that take place in the Vatican and Rome’s churches. Archbishop Velasio De Paolis, the head of the Vatican’s Prefecture for Economic Affairs, said that Brown had “turned the gospels upside down to poison the faith”.
I’ve not read any of Mr. Brown’s work, nor do I have any plans to see the movies; but if the Church keeps banning them, I’ll probably have to pick one up to see what all the fuss is about.
The Catholics are right to see threats in such stories, of course. Popular fiction can introduce and reinforce news ideas that go against long-standing conventions, slowly enlightening the masses as they become accepted more eagerly than simple, blatant truths tend to be. If I stand up and say, “the Catholic Church’s doctrine is bullshit”, I’m dismissed as a lunatic or a competitor or someone with an agenda; but if I write a good story that gets people to think a little about why the church’s doctrine is bullshit, I’ve chipped away a little more at its crumbling stone walls. History is full of examples where fiction has helped change the world for the better; one that immediately springs to mind is the effect on racial relations in the US of Mark Twain’s portrayal of black characters as actual thoughts-and-feelings human beings.
The irony is not lost on me, when hearing of these expressions of holy outrage, that the Church is protesting against fiction that endangers their own fiction; they’re engaged in a war of interesting lies where only one side is willing to admit they’re just making it up as they go along.
It’s been a fairly quiet week for Christian-based fanatical nonsense, but there are always plenty of stories from our friends in the Islamic world to make for a long TWiF post.
The Reader’s Digest web site has an interesting article about a moderate Muslim woman and the death threats she faced from her fellow believers in “the religion of peace” when she spoke out against the treatment of women in her culture. It seems to me there’s a bit of a double standard at work when a woman who speaks out gets death threats, but a man who speaks out for women’s rights in Iran only gets arrested. But I guess a man with funny ideas is a lot less dangerous to society than an uppity female.
That’s not to say the life among Islamic fundamentalists is easy on the menfolk, however. For instance, if you’re deemed to be less than diligent in memorizing your Koran verses, your teacher could take it upon himself to kill you. And if you’re dead, you can’t strap a bomb to your back and die in a glorious suicide attack, so study hard!
Parts of Africa have been mentioned in previous installments here over literal witch hunts against children and the elderly. Turns out that in Tanzania, there’s another endangered group: albinos.
Discrimination against albinos is a serious problem throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but recently in Tanzania it has taken a wicked twist: at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.
Many people in Tanzania — and across Africa, for that matter — believe albinos have magical powers.
Apparently there’s quite a profit to be made in the albino body part market, and, of course, whenever religion meets a profit motive, somebody’s gonna have a leg sawed off.
Religion and profit can lead to atrocities, but religion and government tend to make atrocities systematic. Canada issued an official “Oops! Sorry!” on June 9th to the few remaining native people of a group of tens of thousands…
who were taken from their families and sent to church-run boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their own languages. Many were sexually and physically abused.
I’m sure the apology makes it all better.
Louisiana’s House of Representatives has passed a measure allowing creationism to be taught in that state’s schools. Let the legal challenges begin! If I were a member of that legislative body, I would have tried to append a rider to the “Louisiana Science Education Act” that officially changed the name of the state to “Lose-iana”.
The final item this week is from the Dept. of Please Don’t Try to Help Us:
An atheist student at the U of Virginia has written a game where the player is challenged to travel through history murdering religious figures. Let’s leave the simulated killings of infidels to the religious folks’ video games, shall we? It’s bad enough so many of them assume that anybody who doesn’t believe in (fill in your deity of choice here) that we’re out to kill them all – creating games like this just weakens the secret secular atheist liberal America-hating cabal that we’re all members of, so cut it out, alright? Don’t want the Grand Satanic Poobah sending his shock troops out after you, do you? (Uh-oh! Have I said too much?!?)
Mark Fiore does some great political cartoons; his latest introduces us to Petrotheism. I wish I’d been the one to come up with that term!