Libya has upped the ante

I have a niggling suspicion that I glossed over the issue of the struggle for freedom in this morning’s post. There is some real shit going down right now:

Pan-Arab news outlets report that Gaddafi’s troops have used live ammunition and heavy military equipment such as anti-tank missiles in Benghazi. Late on Sunday fierce clashes were being reported in Tripoli. Libya Al Youm reported on its website on Sunday that the regime was using “heavy weapons” and shooting at random.

I cannot put too fine a point on this – Muammar Gaddafi has authorized the use of deadly force against civilians for exercising their right to free speech and free assembly. He has called in foreign mercenaries and snipers to shoot Libyan citizens, and has directed weapons strikes from aircraft against crowds of unarmed civilians. The United States declared war against Iraq at least partially on the justification that he had done stuff like this to his people. The drama is rapidly unfolding:

Meanwhile, two Libyan fighter jets have landed in Malta, where officials say the pilots defected after they were ordered to bomb civilians. Two Libyan helicopters apparently carrying French oil workers have also landed in Malta.

These reports are unsubstantiated eye-witness accounts so it’s entirely possible that we’re not getting the unvarnished truth here, but these reports are coming from Al Jazeera and the BBC – not exactly World Net Daily.

By the time you’ve read this, this “news” will be more than 24 hours old, but I’ve been told by a handful of people who don’t read the news regularly that they wouldn’t have known about this stuff if I hadn’t been harping on it. I hope this will motivate you to read up a little about what’s going on – this will have major repercussions for all of us for many years to come. It’s a good idea to be paying attention. This morning, Gaddafi appeared on state television and gave an hour-long histrionic rant, blaming America and demanding that his fictitious supporters go out onto the streets and arrest those protesting the government, promising death to all who oppose the government. Chilling stuff.

Of course in all the tumult it’s easy to forget that The Ivory Coast has been in a state of violent revolution, with citizens being murdered and raped, since November.

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Something important is still happening

Back in the beginning of January, the people of Tunisia decided they’d had enough of systemic government corruption and a leadership that had repeatedly demonstrated its contempt for its people. They staged a large-scale protest, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets and calling for the resignation of then-president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. When Ben Ali fled the country and his government toppled, people in oppressed countries all over Africa and the Middle East took immediate notice.

That spirit of revolution and the power of ordinary people to affect widespread change was picked up almost immediately by the people of Egypt, who fought an even tougher battle against a firmly-entrenched and powerful leader. The people’s desire for wholesale change was barely dented by vicious violence directed by a corrupt government, its baton-wielding thugs and its unashamedly dishonest state media. It took weeks of mounting protest and the attention of the entire world, but the protests (largely peaceful although there was occasional retaliation by anti-government protesters) eventually achieved their stated goal: the removal of Hosini Mubarak after 30 years of corrupt rule.

As I stated previously, there’s really only one important thing happening in the world right now, and it’s spreading:

Hundreds of Libyans calling for the government’s ouster clashed with security forces early Wednesday in the country’s second-largest city as Egypt-inspired unrest spread to the country long ruled by Moammar Gadhafi. Ashur Shamis, a Libyan opposition activist in London, and witnesses said the protest began Tuesday and lasted until the early hours Wednesday in the port city of Benghazi.

What’s perhaps most interesting about these protests is that the governments don’t seem to learn much from each other’s missteps:

Protests have been banned in Bahrain and the military has been ordered to tighten its grip after the violent removal of anti-government demonstrators, state TV reports. The army would take every measure necessary to preserve security, the interior ministry said. Three people died and 231 were injured when police broke up the main protest camp, said Bahrain’s health minister.

The immediate reaction of these regimes seems to be the use of force to quell dissent. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t seem to work all that well, and often only serves to bolster the resolve of the people who are in the streets. It seems as though people living in autocratic regimes where police and government officials are all corrupt and organize crime syndicates are often inextricably intertwined with the normal day-to-day business of living aren’t all that afraid of getting beat up if the chance of freedom exists. Sometimes, the consequences are more dire than that:

Bahraini security forces have opened fire on anti-government protesters, witnesses and opposition activists say. The protesters were fired on after they had streamed into the centre of the capital Manama from the funerals of protesters killed in a security crackdown earlier this week. Witnesses said the army fired live rounds and tear gas, and officials said at least 120 people had been hurt.

Two people have been killed and 40 wounded after police shot at a crowd of protesters in Kurdistan, northern Iraq. Hundreds of young men, chanting slogans against corruption and high unemployment, tried to storm the local government offices in Sulaimaniya. There have been a string of protests in cities across Iraq. On Wednesday, three people were killed in clashes with police in the southern city of Kut.

At least three people have been killed during widespread anti-government demonstrations in Yemen. Two people were killed in the southern port city of Aden from gunfire as police moved to disperse protesters, medical officials and witnesses said. In the city of Taiz, one person was killed when a grenade was thrown from a car into a crowd of protesters. And in the capital Sanaa, supporters and opponents of President Ali Abdullah Saleh clashed on the streets.

Iran’s opposition leaders should face trial and be put to death, the country’s hardline lawmakers said Tuesday, a day after clashes between opposition protesters and security forces left one person dead and dozens injured. At an open session of parliament Tuesday, pro-government legislators demanded that opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mahdi Karroubi and former reformist President Mohammad Khatami face be held responsible for the protests.

It’s tempting to cheer unabashedly for the forces of popular reform. After all, these are countries that are ruled by despotic leaders that regularly violate the human rights of their own people, hold corrupt “elections” where the outcome is decided a priori and fail to display anything that looks even slightly like common decency. However, just because those people are being thrown out, that doesn’t mean that the new batch is necessarily going to be any better. Imagine what it would look like, for instance, if the Tea Party in the United States successfully overthrew the government and installed Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann as the new leader – sometimes the people are idiots, and find even bigger idiots to lead them.

Most interesting (to me personally) in all of this is the role that the media and especially the internet are playing. The uniform knee-jerk reaction from those in power has been to spread lies over state media about how violence is being started by the protesters, that they are sponsored by foreign interests, that police are being called in to protect the people… the list of falsehoods goes on. Despite attempts to silence reporters (and the particularly disgusting and shocking case of Lara Logan’s assault in Egypt), reports have been flowing out on a regular basis. In an age when anyone with a cell phone and an internet connection can become an instant amateur journalist, controlling the flow of information has become next to impossible. The United States is making noises like it understands that:

China has warned the US not to use calls for internet freedom as an excuse to meddle in other countries’ affairs. The foreign ministry comments came after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced an initiative to help dissidents around the world get past government internet controls. Since Mrs Clinton’s speech, comments about it have been removed from China’s popular Twitter-like microblog sites.

It seems like some autocrats never learn. Whatever the outcome of all of these uprisings, the inability of these despotic states to control the free speech of their citizens will ultimately ensure their downfall. No society that can communicate with the rest of the world can truly be controlled by its rulers.

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B.C. Ferries cracks down on… wait, what?

Sometimes things happen that are so stupid that I’m not quite sure what to say:

Ferry riders using BC Ferries free WiFi service are out of luck if they want to buy condoms online or research where to get an abortion. That’s because BC Ferries online web filters are designed to block any websites about “sex education and abortion”, along with those for sites like pornography, hate speech and piracy.

Although I’m puzzled as to the circumstances under which you’d need information about abortion or condoms on a 2-hour ferry ride, I’m even more baffled by why anybody would bother to block such sites. Were there complaints lodged against frequent abortion searchers? Did someone abandon their laptop and have some poor Amish kid who’d never heard of condoms before wander over and accidentally see a picture of something that suggested sex?

From a consequentialist point of view, this is really a non-issue. Information about abortions and condoms is easily available just about anywhere in the major cities, and given that most kids have ready access to the internet at home and at school, and get semi-decent sex ed in their high school classes, banning access to these kinds of sites really won’t have a negative impact on anyone. The part that’s disturbing is the company these sites supposedly keep:

The list of blocked content categories includes typical filtered items like “child porn”, “hate speech”, “illegal activities” and “non-sexual nudity” along with bandwidth-hogging content like “streaming media” and “file transfer services”. But the list also includes any sites about abortion, a legal medical service in B.C., and sex education, which is part of the B.C. curriculum.

BC Ferries spokeswoman Deborah Marshall said the ferry corporation decided to block such material because it feared websites about abortion or sex education might contain inappropriate photos.

Is Craigslist filtered? Is Reddit? Is 4chan? If you want to find inappropriate images, those are pretty decent one-stop shops. Not only that, but depending on your definition of “inappropriate”, Google image search will yield some… well you be the judge.

It seems like a bizarrely arbitrary line to draw, and this particular grab-bag of issues smacks of political gamesmanship.

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A dream of a time that never was

There’s a lot of rhetoric in conservative circles about the need to “take the country back”. It’s become a favoured battlecry for that depressingly lackwitted abdicator of responsibility, Sarah Palin. For some reason, this line resonates in the minds of her followers. Those of us who were paying attention in history class are therefore moved to ask “back to what?” My mind personally goes back about 50 years to a time when my parents wouldn’t have been allowed to marry in many parts of the country, and where my dad wasn’t allowed to vote. I have no particular nostalgia for the 1950s or 1960s (as I point out every time Mad Men is discussed).

Our entire history as a civilization is a series of circumstances where people worked their asses off to make things suck just a little bit less. The 1900s saw us struggling to deal with the backlash of the industrial revolution, the 1910s saw the world thrown into the chaos of war, 1920s saw an attempt to recover from the war and the ramifications of women’s voting rights, the 1930s saw us in the grips of major economic collapse, the 1940s saw yet another war, the 1950s were marked by horrible racial segregation and conflict, as were the 1960s. The 1970s we struggled with a paranoid overreaching state grappling with its own citizens, and more economic uncertainty and human rights issues marked the 1980s. The 1990s saw us coming to grips with technology that far outpaced our public knowledge and comfort. The past decade was defined by global war, food shortage, political instability, and even more overreach by a paranoid state.

Which of these decades does Sarah Palin want us to “go back” to? Or does she want us back in the 1800s where there was no middle class, and living to 50 was considered miraculous?

Of course Sarah Palin has no idea what she’s talking about (shock! gasp!), preferring to rely on soundbyte-length policy that is completely free of any kind of scrutiny. Of course she’s merely a self-perpetuating symptom of the larger problem, like having an eating disorder that causes you to binge – she is a feed-forward mechanism that drags an already-flawed view of the world even deeper into crazy-land. It is interesting to note, however, that this kind of false nostalgia for an idyllic era that has never existed is beginning to crop up elsewhere:

Recent years have seen renewed interest in works by Norman Rockwell, the famed 20th Century American artist behind some of the most nostalgic images of small-town America… His iconic works featured a cast of kindly – and almost entirely white – policemen and soldiers, baseball players, quirky neighbours in the state of Vermont, awkward young couples, Christmas homecomings and other images of an America that seems to have receded into the past – if it ever existed at all.

I remember back in grade 6 art class when we were made to study some of the elements of Norman Rockwell’s portraits of the United States. This was well before I had any insight into racism, when my definition was more or less what everyone else thought of – police dogs and fire hoses. As a result, I took away from the images exactly what the teachers expected us to take away – cartoonish depictions of a simpler time.

Despite my history as a musician, there is very little about me that can be described as “artistic”. I have visited art museums a handful of times in my life (always at the request of someone else), and have struggled to understand why some paintings are considered “great” while others get sold for $75 at coffee shops or on the streets by homeless guys. I do, however, have a great deal of appreciation for the medium of visual art as a means of expressing new ideas, as I’ve mentioned before. In fact, that article, in which I discussed my experience with Kerry James Marshall, specifically references the surreal fantasy world that Norman Rockwell is supposedly capturing.

The fact is that there’s no truth in these Rockwell paintings. If anything can be derived from them, it’s that when those images were created there existed a fantasy of a kind of world where such things would be considered normal. Pretending that those are a depiction of reality is like using today’s pornography as an anthropological study of the relationship between bored housewives and pizza deliverymen.

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Please don’t be… aww crap

There’s a phenomenon in the black community, whenever someone sees a headline like this:

Man, 21, arrested for drug possession and assault

We immediately flinch and say “Please please please don’t be a black guy.” It’s a reaction to the fact that, nearly without exception, whenever a black man makes the news it’s because he’s a gang-banger arrested for some crime. The problem is that this event reflects such a small proportion of the black population, and yet the fallout is something we all must deal with. We are all tagged with the crime, as our culture unconsciously (in most cases) links the man’s skin colour to his propensity to commit crime. As a result, I get distrustful looks from old ladies when walking the streets at night, and am assumed to be the one in my group of friends who sells drugs.

I’d imagine that Christians are starting to get an appreciation for that phenomenon when they see headlines like this one:

Charity chief convicted of sexual assault

Given the number of Christian organizations, leaders and celebrities that have been exposed doing decidedly un-Christlike things in the past little while, you’ve got to imagine that Christians are more than a little concerned every time someone makes the news for doing something really evil.

I guess we can both say “oh shit” in unison:

The head of two Toronto-area organizations that were stripped of their charitable status after submitting “falsified” documents to federal regulators was sentenced this month for sexual assault for inappropriately touching a teenager, CBC News has learned. Daniel Mokwe was sentenced Jan. 13 to time served — two nights in jail — and given two years probation.

The victim, a minor at the time of the assault, told Det. Richard Petrie of the Toronto Police Service that she knew Mokwe was a pastor. As a result of the incident, she lost her faith in God and would never enter another church again, she said.

Yep, he’s black and Christian. His “charity organization”, Revival Time Ministries (which sounds like a children’s television program on a god-bothering channel) had its licensed revoked after Canada Revenue (the Canadian equivalent to the IRS) found a series of irregularities in their bookkeeping. Mokwe had another charity called “Save Canada’s Teenagers” – the irony should not be lost on anyone.

If I were a lesser blogger, I could score a few cheap points off of pointing out that Jesus didn’t keep Mokwe from being both financially and sexually corrupted, and that this is “proof” that Christianity is just as empty as all religions. I think the point to be made here is larger than that one though. Daniel Mokwe is undoubtedly a bad person, using the auspices of a charitable organization and his position as an authority figure to abuse both the tax code and, more devastatingly, a young girl. The problem is the source from which Mokwe derives his authority – namely, his position as a pastor. His parishoners, and likely those who donated to him, placed trust in him at least partially based on the fact that he claimed a personal relationship with YahwAlladdha. They essentially granted a portion of the trust that they placed in the deity itself in the hands of a man who told them he is tight with the almighty.

I can’t harp on this issue enough, it seems. The problem is not religion per se. The problem is that we take it seriously. If I told you I had a special insight into a voice in the sky, as revealed through interpretation of Beowulf, you’d (quite rightly) think me a lunatic in need of some therapy. However, if I tell you instead that I am granted authority by Yahweh based on the Bible, all of a sudden my cup doth overflow with credibility. Why? Why do people who claim a particular brand of magical thinking get a free pass into positions of trust? Why indeed, since they seem to have no lesser frequency of violating that trust than someone who is a non-believer?

It is there where the difference between the “don’t let him be black” and the “don’t let him be Christian” arises. Black people don’t claim to be morally superior, or to have a conduit to absolute truth based on the colour of our skin. Christians, however, do claim such superiority. Christianity has been made synonymous with honesty and righteousness over generations, despite all evidence that such association is a big steaming pile of turds. It relies on this borrowed heft of asserted uprightness in order to be made a member of the conversation. Why on Earth would we listen to a bunch of nutjobs who think that the only possible explanation for a woman giving birth without having sex with her husband is that God did it, or who think that a book written by amassing the third-hand account of people who claim to have known a particular Palestinian carpenter decades before the fact is the literal word of the almighty? When evaluating those claims at face value, they can be, and should be, dismissed as nonsense.

As long as we keep re-applying the thin varnish of respect to the rotting woodwork of religion, we will see scam artists like this perpetrate their fraud again and again.

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My one comment on Egypt

If you aren’t aware of what’s been happening in Egypt over the past couple of weeks, you might want to check your pulse – you might be dead. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, inspired by a similar populist uprising in Tunisia, took to the streets to demand that their “president”, Hosini Mubarak, vacate his office. There are an abundance of news outlets giving much more informed and detailed analyses of the situation than I ever could, and so I will not insult you with my ham-fisted and largely ignorant take on the situation. However, there is something that I think I am in a reasonably comfortable position to comment on.

I mentioned the reality of Egypt briefly back in May, when I noted that Mubarak had renewed the state of emergency powers of his government for yet another iteration. I said this at the time:

Apparently there’s been a state of emergency in Egypt for the past 30 years, such that the emergency powers that allow the government to tap the phones of political opponents, crack down on free media and confiscate property have been on the books since then. Police are also allowed by law to beat protesters – good thing too, because as everyone knows, freedom rings with the sound of boots and truncheons on skulls. While the president has said he plans to remove the wire tapping, confiscation and media provisions, he still insists there’s a constant state of emergency, and that the laws are required “to battle terrorism”. Someone’s been paying attention to the United States – Patriot Act anyone?

I didn’t really give Egypt another thought until a couple of weeks ago when the mass protests started. New facts have come to light, namely the United States’ complicity, nay, de facto encouragement of Egypt’s corrupt leadership. As a result, when the protests started, and given the peaceful and reasonable way in which they began, I was firmly on the side of those demanding regime change. However, knowing my habit of running with the bias of the media (which is obviously going to be pro-democracy here in North America), I tried to keep my skeptical hat firmly screwed on.

It is entirely possible that the protests are fomented by groups that are trying to fragment Egypt and install a radical religious regime, or by those who are trying to destabilize the already-unstable Arab world. That is, at least, what the government has been claiming since day 1. Given that there is a middle class in Egypt, with a fairly secular legislature and history, it might be worthwhile listening to the “official” story rather than buying wholesale into the “rah rah democracy rah” story.

But then reports like this began surfacing:

The United Nations top human rights official and a chorus of European nations on Friday condemned attacks on reporters covering pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt, while TV station Al-Jazeera announced its offices had been stormed and burned and its website hacked. The Qatar-based satellite station — widely watched in the Middle East — portrayed Friday’s attack as an attempt by Egypt’s regime or its supporters to hinder Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the uprising in Egypt. It said the office was burned along with the equipment inside it.

…

Denmark’s TV2 channel on Thursday aired footage of an attack on veteran reporter Rasmus Tantholdt and his cameraman, Anders Brandt. The two were on their way to the Mediterranean city of Alexandria when they were stopped at a checkpoint and then chased by an angry mob of some 60 to 70 people wielding clubs. They sought shelter in a shop and are now safe in an Alexandria hotel, the station said.

…

Two Fox News Channel journalists were severely beaten by a mob near Tahrir Square on Wednesday. Correspondent Greg Palkot and cameraman Olaf Wiig had retreated to a building, but someone threw a firebomb inside and the men were attacked as they rushed out, said Michael Clemente, Fox’s senior vice-president for news.

The Greek daily newspaper Kathimerini said its correspondent in Cairo was briefly hospitalized with a stab wound to the leg after being attacked by pro-Mubarak demonstrators in Tahrir Square. A Greek newspaper photographer was punched in the face.

The thing about journalism, at least in today’s reality of live-streamed video and immediate access to a diverse array of reporting, is that it’s nearly impossible to completely stifle a story. The other side of that reality is the fact that it’s never been easier for the average person to access multiple perspectives on the same story, the result of which is that even a casually-interested person can get a more holistic view of events with a minimum of effort. Whether or not people do this is another matter entirely, but they could easily.

When all the different perspectives begin telling a common story – that a huge section of the population in multiple cities in the country are all demanding the same thing, and are demonstrating peacefully and reasonably, it’s difficult to draw any other conclusion. It’s certainly difficult to imagine that this is a cleverly-orchestrated plot by Islamists (who up until now have used violence and religious bullying as their chief weapon) or Zionists (who would have little sway in a Muslim-majority country) to overthrow a benevolent government.

My rejection of the government’s position became absolute, however, when I heard of pro-Mubarak mobs being directed to attack journalists. Whatever credibility the government story may have had (and believe me, it wasn’t much) was immediately undermined by their immediate blacking out of media and internet, and the final nail in the coffin was their willingness to use violence and intimidation to try and silence the voices of dissent, let alone dispassionate viewers of events.

I have seen footage from Tahrir square. I have seen men nimbly avoiding molotov cocktails as they run forward to throw firebombs of their own. I have seen a man dragged from his vehicle and beaten by a crowd. I’ve seen both sides do things that I condemn. However, my attempts to remain neutral and castigate both sides is irreversibly undermined by the attempt of the government to silence dissent. I can understand the willingness of the anti-government protesters to strike back against the thugs who have been pressed into service to try and beat the protesters into submission, and I simply cannot remain objective and neutral when I see an intentionally-orchestrated campaign of violence perpetrated against people who are carrying cameras, trying to document the thing.

If a government has nothing to hide, it does not attempt to silence its critics. If a government is smart, it realizes that in today’s age of instantaneous relaying of information, trying to silence critics is a futile effort.

It seems that Hosini Mubarak’s government is neither of these things.

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Hating gay people brings the world together

We tend to have a fairly blind spot for Africa in this part of the world. Above and beyond our annoying tendency to think of Africa as a single political entity (rather than a continent with 53 distinct sovereign states – there are only 49 in Europe) , we have an entirely fictitious picture of the continent as a whole. I had drinks a while back with a friend who opined to me that part of the reason Africa had such an economic problem was because it lacked the natural resources that were so abundant in North America and Europe. This is, of course, the product of thinking of Africa as a vast wasteland of desert with slim pickings that require subsistence farming by its various tribes of bushmen. That entire picture is ludicrously false – the problem is that Africans have little control over their abundant natural resources, most of which are owned by foreign multi-national corporations.

As a result of this fractured image, we tend to think of ourselves as having little in common with the African people (aside from the sort of universal things we have in common with all people everywhere). However, we can hang our hats on this little nugget: they hate gay people just as much as we do:

A Ugandan gay rights campaigner who last year sued a local newspaper which outed him as homosexual has been beaten to death, activists say. Police have confirmed the death of David Kato and say they have arrested one suspect. Uganda’s Rolling Stone newspaper published the photographs of several people it said were gay next to a headline reading “Hang them”.

Hooray, they’re just as hate-filled as we are! Of course, we should be completely unsurprised by this, as Uganda had gone from being a major international player to a haven for the most vile and disgusting attitudes in the world. There is currently a movement afoot to pass legislation that would authorize the death penalty for the “crime” of being homosexual. I watched the leader of this movement on TV a few months ago being asked why he was persecuting gay people. His response (part 1 here, and part 2 here) was very revealing for two reasons. First, he considers the international opposition to the bill to be fueled primarily by colonial interference (which is a real concern in Africa, so I can’t say I blame him). The second one is that this movement is explicitly defended on religious grounds. He claims that homosexuality is “against God” repeatedly, unashamed to wear his Christianity on his sleeve.

I’ve alluded to this before, but Christians aren’t allowed to duck responsibility for stuff like this, as much as they’d like to. This false notion of “loving the sinner but hating the sin” quickly metastasizes into outright hatred like this. I’m sure that the people who are pushing for this bill think that they’re “loving the sinner” too. The problem arises when the “sin” is an inherent component of the identity of the “sinner” – when those two things are inextricably linked, it’s impossible to actually accomplish the things that this kind of cognitive dissonance would dictate. It is for this reason that homophobes repeatedly try to case homosexuality as a choice, or some kind of disease, or something that can be “fixed” through prayer and counselling.

Things are “sins” based only on their necessary outcomes. If homosexuality necessarily results in negative outcomes, then it is absolutely a bad thing. Rape, for example, is necessarily a bad thing because it violates the autonomy and security of another human being. Paedophilia is necessarily bad because it violates the trust of a minor who lacks the ability to make mature judgments. Homosexuality is not necessarily linked to the kinds of things that anti-gay advocates thump as proof of the harm of ‘teh ghey’ – HIV, abuse, promiscuity – these things all happen regardless of sexual orientation.

It’s tragic that Mr. Kato was murdered for standing up for his human right to exist without being imprisoned or executed for being gay. We can’t pretend that the kind of virulent ideas that are promoted by anti-gay activists and “love the sinner” Christians had nothing to do with it. Pretending to do so is simply willfully remaining ignorant and pretending that the murder of gay people isn’t a big enough problem for you to care about.

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Why I’m not content to “leave it be”

Go on any Youtube video that has anything to do with religion. Go ahead – I’ll wait.

Found one yet? Good. Now scroll down the comments section. I’m willing to bet money that somewhere in the first 3 pages (unless the pages are dominated by a conversation between a troll and someone patiently attempting to explain evolution or Pascal’s Wager or cosmology to said troll) there is a comment from someone saying something like the following:

“man we shood all chill wit this religion arguin shit let ppl believe wut they believe……i believe in god…..if u dont theres no judgin…..it doesnt affect me so therefore idc and dont judge me sayin that im livin a lie bcuz thats not wut i believe and wut i believe matters to me…..not opinions from u guys tryin to prove your theory…..there is no way to prove god…….but let ppl believe wut they do and chill da fuck out!!”

I’ve talked before about this kind of response and why it’s a futile one. In religious circles it’s “let people believe what they want!”; in racial circles it’s “black people need to get over it”; and in LGBT circles it’s “gay people need to stop complaining”. These kinds of comments are reminiscent of nothing more than a child whining that they’re quitting a game because the big kids are meanies. It’s the rhetorical equivalent to standing up and proudly refusing to take part in a conversation because you’re too lazy. Issues are important, and the truth is even more so. If you don’t want to be part of the conversation, that’s your business; only don’t insert yourself into it only so long as it takes to chastise everyone else for having the courage to take a stand.

Here’s the problem with everyone just “chilling da fuck out” – it assumes that the only reason people are arguing is to hear themselves talk. While I don’t doubt this happens in some circles, most of the time there is a solid reason why people are getting amped up about human rights:

Police are searching for a suspect after a homosexual U.S. man was beaten unconscious and left nearly naked in the snow after telling another man about his sexual orientation at a central B.C. hot springs. Police said the Dec. 29, 2010, incident near Nakusp, about 240 kilometres northeast of Kelowna, started when two gay men were sitting in a hot tub and were joined by a third man.

Things like this don’t happen in a vacuum. People don’t beat the bejeezus out of each other for no reason. They certainly don’t assault a man and leave him for dead (in the absence of any kind of preceding conflict) at random – this world would be a very different and far more dangerous place if that was the case. Hatred for a group of people doesn’t spring forth from the mind spontaneously – it comes from a variety of sources: upbringing, education, and the prevailing social climate.

“The beating lasted for a little bit of time, where it ended up about 50 feet away from the hot springs. The victim obviously attempted to get away, but was continually kicked and punched and pushed to the ground as he attempted to flee. “He was essentially left unconscious in the snow, in his shorts and in a wilderness environment.”

There is a large contingent of folks who, at times like these, trot out the old chestnut “all crimes are fueled by hate” or some other such nonsense. The premise of their argument is that any assault is fueled by hatred toward the other person – if you didn’t hate them why would you assault them? Of course this is fallacious reasoning that ignores the larger picture: that hate is being propagated against specific groups more than others. If we pretend otherwise, we’re simply trying to sweep the details under the rug, which allows the status quo to continue unabated. Gay and lesbian people (particularly gay men) are being physically assaulted simply because they’re gay; the only way to conclude otherwise is to stick fingers in your ears and refuse to see a pattern where one exists.

I’ve said before that I’m not an advocate of punishing hate crimes as being separate from regular crime. My reason for saying so is that the lines drawn around what kinds of groups are considered targets of “hate” seem pretty arbitrary, and laws with arbitrary definitions are notoriously easy to abuse. I have to amend my position, however. Crimes like this one don’t start and stop with the perpetrator and victim – every gay man who hears about this story is made a victim of hatred:

He said the main obstacle for the victim and his 39-year-old partner, who is from B.C.’s Lower Mainland, is the emotional turmoil they will have to overcome. “Physically, he’s fine,” Hill said of the victim. “All his wounds will heal . . . but the biggest scar he’s going to have is emotional, for both of them. You can only imagine the fear that one would have to go through to be beaten in the wilderness and left in the snow . . . disoriented and not even knowing where the hot springs were.”

Similarly, failing to recognize the abhorrent nature of the assailant’s attitude toward gay men sends a message to every homophobe out there that hatred of gay men isn’t really a problem.

Hate crime legislation isn’t enough though. It does not accomplish the goal of changing people’s minds – only punishing those whose minds are fucked up. The only way to change minds is for people to stand up and refuse to “leave it be”. In the meantime though, we can do our best to protect each other from the kind of hatred and bigotry that erodes the foundation of our civilization and propagates these kinds of attacks, and if hate crime legislation helps accomplish that goal then I can be brought around to supporting it.

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And in case you thought I was being unfair…

In addition to the majority of my family, I have friends who are Catholic. A person with whom I did my undergraduate degree, who I have a great deal of affection for, reacted strongly to one of my previous posts about the ongoing stupidity present in the Catholic Church. She did not appreciate my characterization of the Church’s policies toward sex and sexuality as destructive and backwards, suggesting that perhaps I lacked understanding of why it was actually God’s manifest will that people in Africa get AIDS because condoms are a greater evil than human suffering.

When I explained to her that I was very familiar with Catholic doctrine, having been an active participant in the Church for the first half of my life, she intimated that perhaps my upbringing was part of the reason I was unfairly targeting the Church. This is a pretty popular attempt to derail a discussion that is common to believers in any kind of deity – you really do believe but you’re just angry so that’s why you’re speaking up. I don’t think it was Mary’s (not her real name) intent to make this argument explicitly, but the subtext was pretty clear.

If I haven’t made this clear before, I will absolutely own up to the fact that I have a particular axe to grind with the Roman Catholic Church. I had great trust in the institution when I was young, but the more I learned about it the more it let me down. I can’t help but feel a sense of personal betrayal that a group that preached morality to me for years is, in fact, so shockingly immoral that it beggars belief. The schadenfreude part of my lizard brain does take some personal delight in their hypocrisy and evil being laid bare. However, as I try my utmost to be a fair journalist in all matters, I take the utmost care to prevent too much of my personal beef from leaking into my analysis of events.

My criticisms of religion, like the one from this morning (which I’m sure Mary will hate, although it’s doubtful she’ll even read it) are about religion, not about a particular religion. I am equally incensed by the stupidity of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, new-age “spirituality” and any other invocation of supernatural nonsense that drapes itself in the robes of undeserved respect that we call “religion”.

An Indian court has remanded in custody a Hindu holy man accused of a string of bomb attacks previously thought to be the work of Muslim militants. Swami Aseemanand allegedly admitted to placing bombs on a train to Pakistan, at a Sufi shrine and at a mosque. He has also allegedly confessed to carrying out two assaults on the southern Indian town of Malegaon, which has a large Muslim population.

There is no religious tradition that is immune from the kind of abuse of its power that is the hallmark of religion. Hindu and Muslim violence is tearing Southern Asia apart, much the way that Buddhist and Muslim violence tore apart the country of Sri Lanka. There is no special status granted to Buddhism or Hinduism (despite what Sam Harris would try to convince you) – supernatural claims and their associated tribal affiliations are not unique to the Abrahamic religions.

Men and women have been banned from shaking hands in a district of Somalia controlled by the Islamist group al-Shabab. Under the ban imposed in the southern town of Jowhar, men and women who are not related are also barred from walking together or chatting in public. It is the first time such social restrictions have been introduced. The al-Shabab administration said those who disobeyed the new rules would be punished according to Sharia law.

Is there any way in which this nonsense makes for a better world? The Orwelian doublethink of the religious would have you believe that such ridiculous restrictions are the way to instill a sense of dignity in the women of Somalia (at least that’s what Mary tried to convince me) – ultimately opening the path to their gaining civil rights. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for a rational mind to look at this kind of abject nonsense and have to square the circle of clear maleficence being committed in the name of morality. Well, actually I can imagine because I did it myself for the better part of a decade.

An Indian shaman who allegedly forced women to drink a potion to prove they were not witches has been arrested. Nearly 30 women fell ill after they were rounded up in Shivni village in central Chhattisgarh state on Sunday and made to drink the herbal brew. A senior police officer told the BBC that six villagers had also been arrested. Witch hunts targeting women are common in east and central India, and a number of accused are killed every year.

This isn’t happening because of a religion, or a particular religious tradition. This is what happens when people actually believe the ridiculous superstitious nonsense that is the bread and butter of faith. When we are told that belief without evidence is some kind of virtue, we open a dangerous door – a door that permits us to murder those who believe differently, to outlaw completely harmless and potentially beneficial practices in the name of an unseen deity, and to poison people on the suspicion of heresy. It is only by throwing out the need for logic and evidence in the name of “faith” that such things are permissible – I don’t care what religious tradition that kind of brainlessness manifests itself as.

Of course the real problem isn’t the religious – it’s us. The emperor’s clothes only exist because we willingly insist that because he believes that he’s not nude, we must do so too. Any respect we grant to the bare naked stupidity that is “faith” is too much. While I’m perfectly willing to respect my neighbour’s right to believe whatever she likes, I will confer no such deference to how I treat the lunacy itself.

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Abuse? What abuse? Quick, look over there!

The long, depressing collapse of the Church of Rome continues unabated, as close scrutiny keeps turning up case after case of child abuse and systematic attempts to shield the perpetrators from punishment. The latest piece of evidence is a letter from Vatican to the bishopric of the Irish Church:

The letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican’s rejection of an Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests. The letter’s message undermines persistent Vatican claims that the church never instructed bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. Instead, the letter emphasizes the church’s right to handle all child-abuse allegations and determine punishments in house rather than hand that power to civil authorities.

Anti-church forces were quick to claim this letter as some kind of “smoking gun” implication of the Church’s hand in covering up the crimes. People have known that this practice was going on for a long time, to the point where it has become a sort of running gag. What the Church long denied was that these kinds of practices were done with the knowledge and implicit approval of the Vatican, and the use of Church political power to shield the guilty from prosecution. That claim has been repeatedly put to the lie by the increasing number of revelations against the Church.

I took the liberty of reading the letter. It is far from definitive proof of anything, let alone the “smoking gun” that conclusively demonstrates that the RCC was taking an active role in shielding child rapists. It is, more or less, consistent with the Church’s ongoing stance of insisting that canon law supersedes secular law. Abusers should be, according to the letter, handled by Church authorities rather than being treated like one would treat any other criminal – automatically turning them over to police. While it’s possible to connect the dots between an exhortation to circumvent the law and a de facto cover-up, this isn’t the document that’s going to pull the whole case together I’m sorry to say.

What’s more interesting than the emergence of this letter is the way the Church is reacting to it. I’m not really referring to their perfunctory and depressingly-predictable denial of reality:

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the letter was genuine. But he told the New York Times: “It refers to a situation that we’ve now moved beyond. That approach has been surpassed, including its ideas about collaborating with civil authorities.” Fr Lombardi said the letter was “not new”, and insisted that “they’ve known about it in Ireland for some time”.

That kind of response is predictable – “oh yes we knew about it the whole time, but that was the old church! This is the new church!” Never mind that the letter isn’t even 15 years old, just keep sweeping that evidence under the rug. But as I said, this kind of response is exactly what you’d expect from a corrupt organization whose misdeeds are finally coming to light.

This is something only the Church could come up with:

Pope Benedict XVI on Friday attributed a miracle to the late Pope John Paul II, which moves the former pontiff one step closer to sainthood. Benedict declared that the cure of a French nun who suffered from Parkinson’s disease was a miracle. A Vatican-appointed group of doctors and theologians, cardinals and bishops agreed that the cure of a French nun, Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre, was a miracle because of the intercession of John Paul.

Two months after John Paul’s death, the nun claimed she woke up feeling cured of her disease. The nun and the others in her order had prayed to John Paul, who also suffered from Parkinson’s. In a statement issued Friday, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints said Vatican-appointed doctors “scrupulously” studied the case and found that the nun’s cure had no scientific explanation.

Imagine for a second that you read this in the newspaper:

Former BP CEO Tony Hayward and a team of company-appointed scientists announced today that the catastrophic oil leak that caused irreversible damage to the Gulf Coast of the United States was, in fact, caused by Mole Men.

“We have long suspected,” said Hayward in a prepared statement “that Mole Men live below the surface of our planet. Given that BP has scrupulous safety standards in place to prevent leaks like this from happening, it is therefore impossible that anything could have gone wrong that was our fault. The only logical conclusion we are left with for this disaster is that Mole Men did it.”

In order to pull that kind of shenanigans, BP would be relying on the fact that everyone in the world is a complete and utter moron. That’s the only way that a line of bullshit that long and stinky could possibly hold up to even the most casual level of scrutiny. But that’s exactly what religious belief does to people – it erodes our ability to hold ridiculous supernatural claims like “a woman got better from Parkinson’s… therefore it was the result of the direct intercession of a particular dead person” up to appraisal. We are expected to simply nod and accept it with open arms.

This kind of ridiculous diversionary tactic should not work. The fact that it does is why I, and other anti-theists, are vehemently opposed to the exalted position of religion. It turns people into idiots who willingly swallow crap and tell you it’s caviar, while all the while committing unspeakable acts of evil and calling it virtue.

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