Apparently a group of journalists has discovered that Bush and his administration might not have been entirely truthful in the run-up to the Iraq war. I’m shocked, shocked I say!
“The cumulative effect of these false statements — amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts — was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war,” the study concluded.
Ya think?
Lake Superior State University has released a list of words and phrases to avoid using because they’ve been overused and lost their original significance. Among them are ones I’d expect to see – “Throw him under the bus”, “x is the new y”, “post 9/11”, “surge”, etc. “Webinar” is in there too, which is kind of surprising as I’ve only seen the word in print a couple of times and have never heard anyone actually say it.
Suspiciously absent from the list was the tiresome “at the end of the day”, a staple these days on TV and in print alike, especially among political pundits. At the end of the day, if you’re going to use “at the end of the day”, you’d better be talking about something that’s actually going to happen at the end of the day.
While skimming the Richard Dawkins Foundation site I came across a link to a new article called WHY THE GODS ARE NOT WINNING by Gregory Paul & Phil Zuckerman.
The basic gist of the article is that from 1900-2000, growth of Christianity and most other religions was fairly static. Among major religions only Islam made significant gains as a percentage of the population, and the authors argue that Islam’s rise has little to do with converting the infidel and much to do with the dramatic population growth in areas where that religion is prevalent.
In fact, they say, the only “belief” system that has seen a large gain primarily through conversions is non-belief. Non-theism has grown by population and not because we atheists are breeding like bunnies (yeah, we like sex, but we’re also allowed to use birth control if the local fundie pharmacist will sell it to us), but because more and more people are, essentially, realizing what nonsense it is to live one’s life in the service of some form invisible sky wizard.
My natural distrust of statistics makes me not want to lay too much importance on this article. On the other hand, the authors have created pie charts, so they must be right.
My current favorite quote from the article:
Even the megachurch phenomenon is illusory. A spiritual cross of sports stadiums with theme parks, hi-tech churches are a desperate effort to pull in and satisfy a mass-media jaded audience for whom the old sit in the pews and listen to the standard sermon and sing some old time hymns does not cut it anymore. Rather than boosting church membership, megachurches are merely consolidating it.
This year I “rang in the new” as usual amongst extended family (mostly on my wife’s side) and accompanied by home-made vodka-based wassail, a few tastes of a fruity thing called 99 Apples, and shots of Plum Schnapps. The aforementioned liquids made our annual impromptu basement recording studio jam session sound even more horrible than usual but seem even more fun at the time. Picture a band of 4-6 untrained adults handed instruments and taught a simple chord or rhythm and told “Just keep playing this!” while the one actual musician among us plays various tunes on his guitar and as many as seven rambunctious children provide as many as seven different, unrelated, yet simultaneous sets of vocals.
Also had a fun argument with a pro-Iraq-war friend of the family. Neither of us had any success changing the other’s point of view, but it was nice being able to discuss both sides of the issue without anybody getting angry or accusing the other of warmongering or treason or hating America.
To my fellow atheists:
Here it is, December 21, start of the Winter Solstice and 4 days until Christmas, and I still haven’t received my invitation from the secret non-believers’ cabal to join in on the annual War on Christmas. I’ve been posting here about my non-belief for months, but have yet to be given the decoder ring or even taught the secret handshake. What gives? I know you people can’t be that disorganized that I’d be lost in the shuffle, because how could such a group like that launch so effective a multi-pronged attack on all things Christian?
Please get in touch ASAP. I won’t post my contact info here because I know you can get it easily through your allies in the Godless Secular Liberal Media(tm). Just, uh, don’t call me on the 25th – I’ll be busy celebrating a holiday with friends and family.
UPDATE: The Daily Atheist has posted an interesting historical tidbit today about the history of the “War on Christmas”.
This week in the midst of reports of reports of witch hunts by Christians in Nigeria, a Muslim father killing his daughter for inappropriate attire, we’re told also of the latest shooting spree, and the blame is laid on who? Why, those immoral atheists, of course!
This one took place in Colorado, with the shooter visiting two locations run by the organization that used to be headed by Ted Haggard (you know, the hateful, holier-than-thou evangelist who, it turns out, spent his spare time snorting coke from the ass-crack of a male prostitute?), slaying several at one site before moving on to the next, where a security guard gunned him down after he opened fire on a large group.
Before the victims’ blood was cold, Tony Perkins, Bigot-In-Chief over at the fundamentalist Family Research Council, was blaming the “secular” media for the shootings.
It is hard not to draw a line between the hostility that is being fomented in our culture from some in the secular media toward Christians and evangelicals in particular and the acts of violence that took place in Colorado yesterday.
Interesting theory. Would this be the same hostile secular media that didn’t bat an eye at the passage of this resolution today, which surely further erodes the wall of separation between church and state that Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues had the foresight to write into our constitution?
Well, in any case, it turns out the shooter was a former member of the delegation who had been kicked out a few years back and held a grudge. Another example of a deranged loner looking for vengeance against a world he felt had slighted him. (We’ll leave aside for now the fact that he grew up in a home-schooled, highly religious environment which fostered in him a healthy love for lethal firearms.) A tragic event, to be sure, with the bulk of the blame rightfully placed on the shoulders of the lunatic who pulled the trigger.
Time to mourn and move on, right?
Nope.
A search for the shooter’s internet postings revealed this little gem:
I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the @#%$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill. God, I can’t wait till I can kill you people. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame, I don’t care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you … as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world.
“He’s an atheist!” screamed the Christian bloggers. “Look! Look! Christians being persecuted!” they cried, a hallelujah chorus ringing out. “Colorado Shooter hated Christians”, said headlines and TV news blurbs.
Turns out, though, that this wasn’t exactly an accurate assessment of the situation. In fact, it was yet another instance of theist quote-mining, pulling out text relevant to their arguments but conveniently leaving out words that might not support them quite so well. To whit, what you won’t find quoted so much are lines like this one:
Thanks for listening and all … even though even many of you ex-Pentecostals don’t understand ……(sic) See you all on the other side, we’re leaving this nightmare behind to a better place.
The other side? A better place? Hmm… those don’t sound like atheist notions.
We can be Christians, we can be spiritual and believe in God/the Cosmic Divine WITHOUT their abusive lying pentecostal charismatic Jesus People movements, groups, false prophets, churches, and programs.
We can be Christians. We can believe in God.
Clearly the writings of a militant non-believer.
In unrelated news, there’s a group that’s calling for the presidential candidates to have a debate on science. It’ll never happen since science isn’t important to most people in this country unless it can get them more cable stations, but I signed the petition anyway. That would be an actual watchable debate, even if only to watch most of them stumbling over words with three or more syllables.
Is there anything the right wing has done lately that hasn’t backfired and caused more harm than good, with the most harm usually inflicted on the very people who were supposed to reap the benefits?
Case in point du jour: Teen pregnancy.
The Bush “Abstinence Only” sex education doctrine has been in place long enough now that we’re starting to see some real results, and they’re just as many predicted: A rise in teen pregnancy rates.
The article on Yahoo is quick to point out that this could be just a stistical blip, not a new trend, but many disagree:
However, some experts said they have been expecting a jump. They blamed it on increased federal funding for abstinence-only health education that doesn’t teach teens how to use condoms and other contraception.
… and much of the data would seem to agree:
The new report offers a state-by-state breakdown of birth rates overall. Many of those with the highest birth rates teach abstinence instead of comprehensive sex education, according to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
And research has concluded that abstinence-only programs do not cause a decrease in teenage sexual activity, Planned Parenthood officials added.
“In the last decade, more than $1 billion has been wasted on abstinence-only programs,” said Cecile Richards, the organization’s president, in a prepared statement.
All I can do anymore when a new government report comes out is to roll my eyes and shake my head in frustration.
Sometimes I go for weeks without posting a single blog entry not because I have no ideas, but because I don’t have the mental focus to sort through the constant bombardment of stimuli and narrow my subject down enough to muster a coherent set of thoughts that haven’t already been expressed all over the blogosphere by the time I get around to it.
Certainly there’s been no shortage of right-wing dishonesty, propaganda, and inhumanity to rant about in the last few weeks – but hey, at least the Iran invasion hasn’t started yet. On the closely related religious-nutjob front, there’s been plenty to talk about as well: the latest mega-church sex scandal, the creationist Discovery Institute’s plagiarism (with the science removed, of course), the Saudi gang-rape victim who got 200 lashes for riding in a car with a man who was not a relative, the teacher arrested for naming a teddy bear Muhammed, the sisters who murdered their own uncle and his wife in front of their chilldren because the couple’s wearing of “western style trousers” showed they were infidels… I could go on, but it’s late and I need sleep, and lots of it, in the 5 and half or so hours left before my alarm goes off.
So anyway, tonight I’m siting around wandering the InterTubes instead of catching up on any of many non-web-surfing tasks I should have been working on. I’m idly thinking, “I need a blog post subject… but what? So much to choose from!”
Then I come across a DIGG link to a baseball video from earlier this summer, and I know I’ve found my subject. Its one of those moments that reminds me that despite a world filled with examples of man’s inhumanity to man (not to mention just plain old-fashioned stupidity) that we as a species do in fact have some redeeming qualities, and that sometimes even large masses of humanity have it in them to collectively Do The Right Thing.
This summer an autistic man sang the national anthem at Fenway Park. Partway through the song he started to become overwhelmed by the attention and slipped into a nervous sort of stutter-laugh reaction. Now, in most sports venues I’ve been to (especially those in a neighboring city, which shall remain nameless, where even victory celebrations sometimes end in car fires in the parking lot), I would expect nothing less than a chorus of boos and “throw da bum out!” calls.
Not so on this day in July at Fenway Park. They cheered him on! When that didn’t work and his voice didn’t steady, they started to sing along with him.
Wow.
Oh, and I’ll add something I find uplifting in a totally different way. The normally detestable “LOLCATS” phenomenon has collided with SF writer John Scalzi’s Creation Museum report to produce the peanut butter cup of hilarity that is LOLCreashun.
After two elections defined by the “values voter” crowd and framed in fundamentalism that tells us our sexuality is to be denied and hidden, the morality crusaders of this nation have begun to see the fruits of their labor. In a nation where “abstinence only” sex education is the rule if your school wants federal funds, and pharmacists who refuse to sell birth control due to religious convictions, there’s good news: the spread of sexually transmitted diseases is at an all time high!
In addition to upswings in chlamydia and syphilis, a gonorrhea superbug (which sounds like a 70’s rock band) with a high resistance to antibiotics is spreading quickly not just in the liberal heathen oasis of California, but in the midwest and south as well, where one would presume the dominance of red-state values and healing prayers would alleviate the problem.
Ah, well… another victory for the forces of ignorance.
The state of Georgia, like much of the southeast this year, has experienced well-below-average rainfall, and drought conditions there have forced some water usage limitations to be enacted until enough of the wet stuff falls from the sky to replenish supplies.
(No, I’m not bringing this up with a global warming angle in mind, though there are certainly connections to be made.)
Governor Sonny Perdue and other officials have been going back and forth with the Army Corps of Engineers over possible shortcomings in the handling of the water supply there and how to address them, as is certainly an appropriate thing to be doing.
What caught my attention today was an article mentioning the governor’s plan to alleviate the drought through prayer. Yes, a prayer service will be held at the state capitol next week to try to bring the rain.
“The only solution is rain, and the only place we get that is from a higher power,” Perdue spokesman Bert Brantley said on Wednesday.
I’m going to assume that when he uses the term “higher power”, Bert isn’t referring to the complex interactions of winds, temperatures, sunlight, and tidal forces that shape our worldwide weather patterns.
Of course they’ve scheduled this rite on a day when rain is actually in the forecast, so if a few drops do come down they can proclaim, “It’s a miracle!” Failing that, they can wait until it does rain, and still proclaim, “It’s a [delayed] miracle!”
Perdue’s office has sent out invitations to leaders from several faiths for the service, set for Tuesday.
Why not just open it to the public? Invite everyone, and make it a festival with a good old-fashioned rain dance! That way it’ll be useless and interesting and maybe even fun – instead of just useless.