Category: Politics

In the wake of Rick Santorum’s almost-win in the Iowa caucuses – an anomaly I chalk up to the timing of his turn as non-Romney-of-the-week – several videos gone viral have stirred up controversy over the statement by this small-government, personal-freedom conservative that states should have the right to outlaw the use of birth control.  In an October interview, he said:  “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.”

 

At first I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.  Dangers of contraception?  As a pro-sex liberal heathen (e.g. evil) I had trouble understanding this statement until I tried to think about it from a godly, moral (e.g. good) perspective.  Once I shifted my point of view, it all became clear!  So, since everybody seems to like lists these days, I present to you:

Rick Santorum’s Top Five Dangers of Contraception

(If Rick Santorum were me, pretending to be Rick Santorum)

5. Condoms are often lubricated, and for me, the fewer Google searches on “lubricant”, the better.

4. Limited access to birth control means even more abortions to get my base riled up about!  Yay!

3. We need to produce lots of low-wage menial laborers to support the coming free-market utopia, so have more babies!

2. Just because God gave us sexual urges and genitalia doesn’t mean it’s okay to do anything with them.  Wait – maybe he gave them to us as test, and the baby Jesus cries when we have unwed non-reproductive intercourse in unapproved positions.  Or maybe Satan gave us sexual urges, and God just let him get away with it.  Either way, sex is bad.

.. and the number one reason why birth control is a threat to civilization:

1. Letting women choose when or if they get pregnant sets us careening down that slippery slope that ends in a society of uppity, non-submissive females.  Mark my words – if we give these bitches the pill, next thing you know they’ll be wanting rights and careers and equality!  As President I, Rick Santorum, will not stand idly in the face of such obscenities.

Before I took off my Santorum hat, just to be thorough, I tried to think of arguments from within the Conservaverse for contraception, and while I only came up with one, it’s a doozy.  It just might be enough to override one through five above!

Rick Santorum’s Top Reason For Contraception

(If Rick Santorum were me, etc.)

1.  Sometimes babies grow up to be gay.

The really disturbing thing about all this is, of course, the image conjured up by the phrase “Santorum Hat”.

I just read Chris Brodda’s latest post over on FTB about the irony of working on a Christmas gift drive through the Military Religious Freedom Foundation while that organization is being vehemently criticized for ruining Christmas by, for example, trying to destroy the “Operation Christmas Child” drive by the Air Force.  But of course the MRFF did no such thing; they simply stated that it was inappropriate for secular military officers to be officially promoting a faith-based program and that it should be put under the auspices of the chaplain service – which it was.

This is all part-and-parcel of the annual “War On Christmas” meme that’s blasted from countless media outlets every year starting just a few weeks before the traditional bombardment of Christmas music and store Christmas displays gets underway.  (That puts it, I’m thinking, sometime in mid-September at this point.)  It seems that the War On Christmas is now being fought with a sinister biological agent, though – one which spreads highly contagious Christian Persecution Syndrome among believers who encounter those already infected.  Because each holiday season, it seems to me, there are more controversies centered around church/state separation issues, and nearly always these stories are framed as incidents of whiny non-believers attacking the rights of Christians.

Often these controversies occur simply because Christians are denied, for one reason or another, the exclusivity or near-exclusivity to which they’re accustomed.  A prime example this year was the Christmas display in Santa Monica, California, where atheist groups won all but two of the spots in an annual Christmas display lottery through the simple expedient of having submitted more entries.  It’s unfair to be suppressed based on a numerical advantage, say believers there, who next year when most or all of the displays are again nativity scenes will brag about their victory over the heathen because of their numerical advantage.

But sometimes it’s about the rights of atheists to put up any display at all, and these times are why it’s critical that every potential violation of church-state separation is challenged.  The Rock Beyond Belief blog has chronicled the attempts to add a non-religious display to a series of religious ones at Travis Air Force Base.  It was denied before complaints got it approved, censored before complaints got it uncensored, dimly lit until complaints got it lit up (along with the Jewish and other displays), and vandalized multiple times.

These battles aren’t just limited to holiday season arguments over Christmas displays, of course.  There’s also the annual “National Day of Prayer” where groups try to prevent the use of our tax dollars to pay for a state-sponsored prayer event, or Rick Perry’s local Texas rain dance day of prayer for rain (which seems to have caused his state to catch fire, as Bill Maher pointed out – though luckily God finally got around to sending some drought-easing rainfall the same weekend the big atheist convention came to town).  There’s the Camp Pendleton Cross and there’s the Tennessee mayor who called the Freedom From Religion Foundation terrorists for expressing opposition to a town-sponsored cross mounted atop a water tower.

All of these cases have two things in common:

• Each of them involve government funding and/or use of government land in what is perceived by the atheist groups involved to be a violation of First Amendment rights through the exclusion or limitation of expression of some religious viewpoints in relation to others.
• Each of them has been portrayed as a further attempt to unjustly persecute the Christian majority.

What I haven’t seen, though, is any instance of real censorship or persecution here in the US, by which I mean removal of rights outside the sphere of Separation.  Where are the attempts to silence Christian speech, privately or publicly, outside the purview of fighting perceived government endorsement of said speech?  Note that I’m not claiming this never happens; atheists can be overzealous and just plain wrong sometimes, just like anybody else.  There probably are real examples out there.  I just haven’t seen them, and haven’t the patience to Google “Christian persecution” and wade through the results.

I thought I’d maybe caught an example earlier this year when I read about the military cemetery that allegedly was prohibiting non-pre-approved prayer at soldiers’ funerals – it sounded suspicious, but I was willing to entertain the possibility that some anal-retentive bureaucrat somewhere was trying to implement an overzealous interpretation of the rules.  Of course, when the facts of the story were presented outside the evangelical echo chamber, it turned out that what really happened was that a group was showing up uninvited at soldiers’ funerals to utter Christian prayers whether the families wanted them or not, and they were told to knock it the hell off already.  If Odin worshipers got chased away from a funeral procession for singing a dirge to open the gates of Valhalla for a fallen warrior, the controversy would be centered around why the government failed to block their entrance to the facilities in the first place.

So what I’m trying to get at, in a long-winded and roundabout way, is this:  I’d like to find some of the real examples of atheists trying to erect barriers to the free expression of religion where there is not a church-state separation issue.  So please, if you’re actually reading this and not a search engine process or a viagra-selling spambot from a .RU domain:  if you know of a real instance of persecution against Christians by atheists or government institutions, add a comment below with a supporting link or two.  I ask this because I truly believe that everyone should have the right to subscribe to whatever theology they want (no matter how wrong or silly it is), and because I believe that the atheist community is best served when it’s willing to call out its own and say, “Hey, I think you’re doing it wrong.”

A few handy notes for CPS sufferers who might take up this challenge:

• When I say “not a church-state separation issue” I mean that there is no argument to be made that public lands, public facilities, or public funding are being used to promote a religious stance.  Stopping official organized prayer in a public school is, by my definition, acceptable.  Stopping individuals from saying private prayers on school grounds is not.
• Disagreement with the tenants of your religion is not censorship.  “I don’t think so” is not going to harm anything but your ego.

Alright, you’ve got your marching orders.  Now go forth, and find me some persecution!

 

The long expected but still surprising news broke overnight of Christopher Hitchens’ death in the wake of his struggle against esophageal cancer.  His final column published in last week’s Vanity Fair was about the absurdity of the phrase “that which does not kill you only makes you stronger”.  Maybe that phrase isn’t true, but that fact that he was writing about it a week before his death showed that even cancer hadn’t sapped away all his strength.

I disagreed with Hitch on a variety of issues – his support for the Iraq war, for instance – but even where I thought he was wrong I admired his wit and eloquence in arguing his points.  Even when he was debating with an unlit cigarette in his hand, clearly thinking about his next nicotine fix, or he was oozing Johny Walker out every pore, he was an intellectual powerhouse.  His willingness to tackle taboo issues should make his career a case study at journalism schools.  He took on MotherTheresa, Gandhi, and religion in general fervently and fearlessly.

The man who famously said of Jerry Falwell that “if they gave the corpse an enema they could bury him in a matchbox” will no doubt be on the receiving end of faux sadness from some of his detractors (“it’s a shame he’s in hell now”) and exuberance from the “Yay, God of Love, for making the infidel suffer for all eternity” crowd.

Hitch may be gone, but the Hitchslap lives on.

Stories of discrimination against non-believers in the US military are rampant.  There are big ones that make national news like the “spiritual fitness” requirements, or the sponsorship of blatantly proselytizing on-base festivals, or the faith-based training for nuclear missile operators and the Air Force Academy’s attempt to pretend the subsequent orders to suspend specific religious elements of all training maybe didn’t apply to them; and there are the smaller, personal stories, like the one recently shared about the marine who was arrested for not attending church services.

There’s a new attempt to draw attention to these problems.  The White House has added a petition system to its web site; any petition that gets a significant number of signatures (either 5,000 or 25,000 – there’s a bit of confusion about the numbers right now) within 30 days will get an official response.  So if you’d like to help drag this issue into the political spotlight, head on over to the White House’s “We the People” page and add your name to this petition:

End the Military’s Discrimination against Non-Religious Service Members

If you’ve experienced discrimination in the military for not being a believer, or not being the right kind of believer, please go share your stories with the folks at Rock Beyond Belief.  The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is another good resource.  The kind of religious coercion that goes on in military environments is not just unconstitutional, it’s unconscionable.  People who have volunteered to put their lives on the line in defense of our national ideals never deserve to be told they’re not fit to do so because they have the wrong opinion about about the magic invisible man in the sky.

 

Conservapedia is a popular fan-fiction site where aspiring writers painstakingly construct an alternate-history parallel universe based loosely around the storyline concocted within the series of fantasy works collectively referred to as “The Bible”. But as with many fantasy realms – especially those where numerous authors have created content, such as in the realms of Star Wars/Trek fandom – there are bound to be continuity errors and questions over what material should be considered parts of the “official canon”.

Well, the creative folks over an Conservapedia have decided on a rather unique way to resolve such disputes: they’re going to re-write the original fantasy novels to better support the later fiction they inspired!

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations. There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning:

* lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ
* lack of precision in modern language
* translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one.

Of these three sources of errors, the last introduces the largest error, and the biggest component of that error is liberal bias. Large reductions in this error can be attained simply by retranslating the KJV into modern English.[1]

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2]

Personally I’m not a fan of the original work, but as an aficionado of fantasy literature and an aspiring writer myself, I’m intrigued enough by this project to consider making some contributions, or at least a few suggestions:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias

Well, of course a good fantasy realm has to be internally consistent to be believable, but it seems to me that if you’re going to address the underlying philosophical message of a piece of writing, your time would be better spent trying to massage away the plot holes that undermine that message. In this case, I’d consider starting with the “thou shalt not kill unless the voice in your head tells you to, in which case slaughter is totally justified” conundrum.

2 Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity

This step needs to be taken a bit further: add more masculinity. What follows are some rough drafts of a few possible ways to handle this transition:

And the Lord commandeth Moses to draw forth his Glock 9mm semi-automatic, and Moses did; and he sayeth unto the Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go, bee-yotch!’ And the girly Pharaoh did run away whining to his mommy like a crybaby liberal, and the Not Really Christians But Close Enough for This Part of the Story did flee into the desert in their Hummers and American-built pickup trucks.

Parting the red sea by belching after a Coors Lite binge is another possible avenue to explore.

And Jesus said, ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, unless Caesar is a democrat or a negro; for those are lying socialist dictators.’ And Jesus did flex his manly biceps, and Mary Magdalene did drop to her knees where she belonged and render unto herself the bulge under his robe, which would have been a sin were Jesus not a family-values Republican.

Wow, this is even more fun than I thought it would be!

3 Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]

Don’t dumb it down, dumb it UP! The Stupid in the Bible is one of the most interesting things about it. Never be afraid to add more Stupid!

4 Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[4] defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.

5 Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”;[5] using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census

Search and replace becomes your best friend here!

6 Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.

For consistency, also accept the logic of Limbo and explain its recent disappearance. Also Narnia and the alien base on Mars where abductees are anal-probed.

7 Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

Thou shalt not steal unless thou canst afford to hire flunkies to do it for thee. The peddling of worthless investments to uninformed consumers shall also raise thee in stature in the eyes of God.

8 Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story

References to feeding the poor and healing the sick contribute to the socialist agenda, so those must also go.

Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels

It goes without saying that examples of open-mindedness which leads to conclusions other than our pre-conceived ones will be correctly excluded.

10 Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

Clearly excessive use of “words” can be dangerous when mixed with the wrong sort of open-mindedness (see above), leading potentially to the sins of Curiosity, Investigation, or even the deadly sin of Questioning. Wherever possible, extensive wordiness should be replaced by buzzwords and simplistic catch-phrases which invite repetition rather than discussion.

How long would this project take? There are about 8000 verses in the New Testament. At a careful rate of translating about four verses an hour, it would take one person 2000 hours, or about one year working full time on the project.

Well then get to work, I can’t wait to read the results! This won’t outsell the original, but it’s sure to be a big hit!

Frank Schaeffer, whose recent article I talked about in my last post, showed up on Rachel Maddow’s show with this to say: