Oregon mosque burned in arson

In my mind, Oregon is known for two things: hipster Mecca (formerly known as Portland), and being the place you get to only after your entire family dies of dysentery. Well, I guess now it’s known for three things:

A fire at an Islamic centre in the western US state of Oregon was started intentionally, US police say. They say the blaze gutted one room of the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center in Corvallis. No-one was injured. The centre had been attended by Somali-born teenager Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, who was held on Friday for plotting to detonate a bomb at a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in nearby Portland.

I’d like to be able to pretend that I can understand the desire for retribution after someone tries to kill you, but I don’t. Partially because nobody has ever tried to kill me, but also partially because I’m not a fucking lunatic. If the KKK had a chapter headquarters in my neighbourhood, or the Hell’s Angels had a club down the street, while I might feel threatened, there’s no circumstance under which I would burn the place to the ground.

Ah, but of course this is a religious thing, so all bets are off. The perverse reality of such an attack is that it will further disenfranchise and polarize the Muslim community in Oregon (all 9 members) and make them even less likely to see themselves as part of the community.

I’m not saying that people should just roll over and give up when they’ve been attacked, but unless your plan is to kill everyone who disagrees with you, your options for reducing the risk of being attacked are somewhat limited. Burning down a community access point may not be the best choice.

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Two faces of India

You’ll undoubtedly have noticed by this time that the majority of these posts are taken from the news. I assume that you can read the newspaper yourself, I just try to pick out the juiciest nuggets and comment on them. Most of the pieces I write revolve around a single news item, which I use to demonstrate some underlying point.  However, I am aware that presenting a single story might give you a mistaken impression, particularly when I comment of goings-on in other countries.

So I thought today I’d contrast two stories coming out of India. First, the bad:

Hindu hardline opposition parties have often raised questions about Italian-born Sonia Gandhi’s faith. They have questioned Mrs Gandhi’s right to rule a country where a vast majority of the population is Hindu.

We are somewhat spoiled here in Canada, living in a country where public discussion of religion is considered rude. Our politicians don’t (by and large) trumpet their religion, and while the word “God” is in our national anthem, we don’t really spend much time or energy on trying to keep religion out of the public square.

India is quite another story, where tribalism and religious differences are intractably linked, and deep suspicions and hatred between groups go back generations. Religion is, to the person on the street, very important. Regular readers may remember the story of the Indian and Pakistani tennis players whose partnership flies in the face of religious schism. It is the same within India.

Luckily, the court has struck down this request for religious identification, so this story isn’t all bad. The fact that it made it that far gives cause for pause, because the only reason it isn’t happening here is because nobody cares… yet.

The next story, though, is all good:

About 2,000 people have joined a gay pride parade in the Indian capital, Delhi, the first such event since homosexuality was legalised last year. Organisers said gay people were demonstrating that they have a place in society, and that the parade was a celebration of being different.

I am so weary of hearing straight people get all hot and bothered over Pride events. “Why do you need to go out and flaunt it? We don’t have straight pride parades!” Mmm, just bask in the privilege denial. The whole point of a Pride parade is to counteract the stigma of shame that has been attached to homosexuality for generations – a stigma that found its way into laws and is still tearing the United States apart.

Here in Canada where gay people have (nearly) equal rights (anyone who feels the need to make the tired and brainless assertion that they have more rights because you’re not allowed to discriminate against them, you’re really overestimating my willingness to listen to stupid arguments), Pride parades might seem redundant. However, we don’t live in a bubble, and our society’s public willingness to allow gay people the freedom to celebrate their identity sends a message to the rest of the world, including India.

The message that is sent by India to the rest of the world is that maybe, just maybe, they’re starting to shake off the crushing yoke of religion and becoming a modern, secular democracy.

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It’s a miracle!

Miracles are funny things. Whenever something good happens, we call it ‘a miracle’. It doesn’t matter if there is a clear causal chain that can be followed from the beginning to the end – it’s still a “miracle” when surgery fixes someone’s cancer; it’s still a “miracle” when seatbelts and safety testing help someone survive a car crash; it’s still a “miracle” when an international team of engineers develop technology to save the lives of 33 men trapped in a collapsed mine, it’s a “miracle”.

So what about when 29 men trapped in a collapsed mine just die there? Is that a “miracle” too?

New Zealand has begun to mourn 29 miners who were declared dead earlier after a second explosion ripped through the shaft where they were trapped. A memorial service was held in the town of Greymouth, and Prime Minister John Key said it was a “national tragedy”.

One of the regular readers of this site is a New Zealander, and I am sensitive to the fact that this might hit home for him, so I am going to do my best to treat this tragedy with the appropriate gravity. There is nothing funny about the death of 30 people, and my characteristic flippancy is targeted not at them, or at the people of New Zealand, but at anyone who wishes to credit the Almighty with only those events that are good, whilst simultaneously failing to take credit for the bad stuff.

So, trying to keep that in mind, here’s my question to those who called the Chilean rescue a “miracle”: why did the New Zealand miners deserve to die in the opinion of your god? Would they have been judged worthy if they had prayed harder? Were their families just not devout enough? Were 28 punished for the sins of 1 other? How about the reverse – were they just evil “on average”? How do you explain the great “justice” and “mercy” of your deity?

Those who criticize the evils of religion are commonly admonished to be fair, and reminded that people do good things for religious reasons too. Assuming that the evil that is done by religion is balanced out by the good (and I don’t think it is), then religion is a negligible factor with respect to goodness. However, the religious are always quick to claim that religion “helps people be good” or some such nonsense that are entirely unsupported by evidence.

It is this same wish to both have your communion wafer and eat it too that comes into play with invocations of the word “miracle”. If God can take credit for things that happen to trapped miners underground, then He has to take credit for both the success of Chile and the tragedy in New Zealand. He has to take credit for both the magic of a newborn child and the horrible reality of stillbirth. He has to take credit for both the majesty of a sunset and the devastation of a hurricane.

But of course we know that God isn’t responsible for any of these things. He’s just responsible for people failing to deal with reality, and cherry-picking their perceptions of the world to preserve the illusion of a just and fair world.

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My Wikileaks response

A friend messaged me yesterday to ask if I was planning on saying something about this unfolding Wikileaks saga. I was planning on steering clear of it, but since this is a blog that is in part about free speech, it might seem particularly conspicuous if I don’t say anything at all.

For the most part so far, it seems that most of the things that were leaked were diplomatic cables wherein people bitch about other world leaders. It’s the equivalent of someone printing out copies of a high school girl’s diary so that everyone finds out what she really thinks of them. I think Wikileaks is a good idea, since people in this hemisphere seem to be happy to ignore the hellscape that is our middle eastern foreign policy, but this particular document dump doesn’t seem to tell us much we don’t already know, and has instead raised people’s backs.

So much of diplomacy seems to be about appearance rather than substance, and it’s rather depressing to think that some of these leaked cables (which have little to no substance) will give recalcitrant states some puerile justification for throwing a tantrum on an international scale. Then again, it’s not like there’s a way for things to get much worse short of dropping actual bombs, and I saw very little evidence that things were getting any better.

But, as I am not a person with a background in international relations, or in possession of a great deal of knowledge about peace & conflict, I am happy to side-step this particular story. There are enough better commentators out there to give you an informed opinion on the subject, rather than my superficial from-the-hip analysis.

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Pope does something marginally decent

…and everyone loses their shit.

Of course this news is a bit dated now, and many of you have probably already heard this story:

Using a condom is a lesser evil than transmitting HIV to a sexual partner — male or female —even if that means averting a possible pregnancy, the Vatican said Tuesday, signalling a seismic shift in papal teaching as it further explained Pope Benedict XVI’s comments.

So the Pope has finally hit on the idea that it might be less evil to protect yourself and your sexual partner than it is to have sex without trying to make a baby. A few questions come to mind:

  1. What about papal infallibility? Were you wrong before, or are you wrong now?
  2. How is it that the moral “leadership” provided by the Catholic Church is about 100 years behind everyone else?
  3. How did it take you this long to figure that out?

Life is not a dichotomous state – there is no such thing as ensoulment or some kind of spontaneous creation of “life”. Ever since Friedrich Wöhler first synthesized crystals of urea, a feat that was supposed to be impossible (organic matter from inorganic components), the philosophy of vitalism has been rapidly dismantled. All of the evidence suggests that “life” is a continuum that reaches back millions of years to the first self-replicating molecule, which was itself made up of “non-living” materials.

In this way, wearing a condom is not “preventing life” anymore than masturbation is mass murder. You’re simply inhibiting a specific chemical reaction that will result in a fertilization. To even consider the suffering of a living, feeling human person equivalent to the prevention of a chemical reaction – to even put those things in the same moral ballpark – takes a particularly craven mind.

And so people began bending over backwards to congratulate the Pope on not being entirely boneheadedly evil:

Catholic reformers and groups working to combat HIV have welcomed remarks by Pope Benedict that the use of condoms might not always be wrong.

I’m reminded of a Chris Rock sketch, where he derides some black men for their perceived tendency to brag about things that aren’t accomplishments, like raising their kids and paying their bills. To this completely unwarranted bragging, Rock retorts: “what do you want, a cookie?” Apparently the world is quite willing to hand an abundance of cookies over to the Pope for finally saying something that pretty much everyone else had figured out already.

But hey, at least he figured it out, right?

Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi said the Pope was speaking about “an exceptional situation” in one of the interviews in the book Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times, which is being published on Tuesday.

“The Pope considered an exceptional situation in which the exercise of sexuality is a real danger to the life of another,” said Fr Lombardi. Benedict used the specific example of a male prostitute using a condom to illustrate his apparent shift in position.

Come the fuck on, Ratzinger! Condoms are only appropriate in exceptional situations? Apparently in the Pope’s world view, it is better for a woman to become pregnant with a child she does not want and cannot afford to raise than it is for her to protect herself during sex. It’s better for a man to become inextricably yoked to another person for the rest of his life than it is for him to use a piece of latex.

And why is it a male prostitute?

Not all sex results in pregnancy (and I thank my lucky stars for that fact), but there’s always a chance. Many people want to have a child, for whatever reason, and are in a position to provide for it. Using condoms, unlike implants or hormone therapies or other intrusive forms of birth control, do not prevent people who want to have children from doing so. It is a simple technology that harms nobody (unless you count sperm, which I don’t).

Whatever claim to some kind of moral insight or authority that the Catholic Church pretends to have is repeatedly undermined by the ethical stupidity that is repeatedly on display from the Vatican.

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Free speech vs… assholes with bike locks

I’m pissed off.

Chained by his neck to two female protesters, University of Waterloo doctoral student Dan Kellar was nevertheless in control of the situation at a campus lecture hall last week, as he sat on stage and chanted slogans to prevent journalist and author Christie Blatchford from speaking about her new book on the native protests at Caledonia, Ont.

I’m not just pissed off because the asshole in question is from my alma mater.

Ms. Blatchford, the Governor-General’s literary award-winning writer of Fifteen Days, was slightly delayed by traffic on Friday, and as university spokesman Michael Strickland announced this to the small audience, he was shouted down with calls of “racist, racist, racist.”

I’m not just pissed off because this asshole is trying to advocate a position that I consider similar to my own, or that I will be lumped in with his assholery.

I’m not just pissed off (although I am mightily pissed off) that free speech is being run over roughshod by a dick, using the principle itself to deny another person the right to speak.

No, all of that would be tolerable. I could deal with these insults and more. The reason I’m really pissed off?

Bike lock, $28
Rent-a-protest, $150 pizza bill
Suppressing the free speech of someone you don’t agree with, priceless.

This asshole has forced me to agree with Scary Fundamentalist. Come on, man! That’s beyond the pale. It’s like when the NAACP got all hot and bothered about Shirley Sherrod and I had to be on the same side as Glenn Beck. I had to take an extra-hot shower after that. Now I’m in the same camp as Scary? C’mon dude! Not cool.

I joke, of course. While pretty much everything that SF says makes me want to ragevomit all over my keyboard (I wear a bib when browsing his site), we are definitely allied on the cause of free speech. Free speech has nothing to do with left or right – it is the only way that a democratic society can work. Where we differ is on… well… everything else.

I don’t care what your position is, whether or not I agree with it, and I am absolutely not above criticizing the assholery of those who are on my end of the political spectrum. You don’t get to be a total douchehat and lock yourself to a podium to protest someone’s speech. Tearing down a building, maybe. Protesting against the government, sure. But to prevent someone from speaking? That’s bullshit.

Usually I’m a bit more articulate than this, but quite frankly, I’m too pissed off to be clever. I also try to have a pithy little signoff at the end of these things, but I can’t think of one, so here is a picture of Johnny Cash expressing exactly how I feel about Dan Kellar.

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Religion meets the courts

I would make a shitty judge. Don’t get me wrong – I look turbo-hot in robes. The problem I’d have is rendering a judgment that fits the law, rather than what I know to be right. After all, a skilled enough lawyer can make a case that a company that dumps toxic waste on baby seals has not broken the law, and my judgment must adhere to that principle.

The courts here in BC seem to be doing a better job:

Dissident conservative Anglicans in Vancouver and Abbotsford have no right to hold on to four church properties valued at more than $20 million, the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled Monday. As a result of the decision, more than 1,200 Anglicans who oppose same-sex blessings and reject the authority of Vancouver-area Bishop Michael Ingham are expected to have to vacate their church buildings soon.

Dismissing the main argument of a costly appeal by the conservative Anglican congregations, Justice Mary Newbury wrote that the dissidents “cannot in my respectful decision remove themselves from their diocesan structures and retain the right to use properties that are held for purposes of Anglican ministry in Canada.”

I read the decision (a fun exercise in legal thinking that I recommend everyone do from time to time), and the main point of the argument seems to be that while the congregation does hold the buildings in a trust, they do not have the right to divorce themselves from official church doctrine. The trust is held based on the assumption that the congregation is defending the official articles of faith – claiming to be “true believers” doesn’t grant them license to violate the official doctrine of the church.

Of course, this is a complete and total waste of time from my perspective. The whole undertaking is based on the belief that an invisible super-being cares who puts what in which orifice. I’ll simplify it for you, conservative Anglicans: nobody cares. There is no super-being, and the only people who are outraged by homosexuality are you. My advice: if it bothers you so much, don’t do it. But please don’t clog up the appeals courts with your superstitious nonsense – some of us are trying to build a society.

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Oh and by the way, religion is still crazy

If you were a new visitor to the blog this week, and didn’t bother to poke through the archives, you probably walked away with the impression that I am an even-handed and introspective commenter on race, history and education. I’m sorry for misleading you. I am actually a militant Gnu Atheist who gets his jollies lampooning the poor beleaguered faithful. As everyone knows, religious people just want to be left alone to practice their beliefs quietly outside the public eye, and we baby-eating fundamentalist  atheists keep trying to trample your rights to religious freedom. Well throw on a baby-eating bib folks, because I’m going for the jugular today.

Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapper used religion as excuse

Mitchell’s defence attorneys contend [Brian David Mitchell, kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart] suffers from an escalating mental illness and holds extreme religious beliefs that lead him to think he is directed by God. “He was his No. 1 priority, followed by sex, drugs and alcohol, but he used religion in all of those aspects to justify everything,” Smart said in a clear voice on her third and final day of testimony Wednesday.

Is this the face of the average believer? No. Absolutely not. This guy is a psychopath who has done unspeakable acts of evil to an innocent woman. The majority of believers (probably all of them) would repudiate this kind of action immediately as having absolutely nothing to do with their faith. However, his propensity for religious belief – his willingness to believe in a supernatural author for his perversion – was used as license to commit these acts. If religion was not available as an excuse for these kinds of things – if people didn’t have the idea in their minds that the voices they’re hearing are from a supernatural (rather than pathological) source, anyone reporting auditory hallucinations of the kind plaguing Mr. Mitchell would likely receive treatment rather than merely the wide berth you give the really religious among us.

His lawyers certainly wouldn’t be using it as a plea.

Capuchin Monks need young, tender males

Roman Catholic friars in Switzerland have placed a job advert in a newspaper as part of a recruitment drive. The Capuchin order says it is looking for professional single men like bankers or lawyers aged 22 to 35 to join its dwindling ranks. The community, which has 200 members with an average age of 70, hopes the ad will help recruit 10 to 20 men.

Yes, it is absolutely a cheap shot. Forgive me, I’ve been good all week. I have to scrub the stench of “reasoned dialogue” off of me.

Yep, the Capuchin monks (not to be confused with Capuchin monkeys which are much cuter, or with cappuccino, which is a delicious hot beverage) are looking for young professionals to bolster its aging and thereby dwindling population. Luckily they’re using tried and true recruitment offers that appeal to the average 22-30 year old:

“We offer you no pay, but spirituality and prayer, contemplation, an egalitarian lifestyle, free of personal material riches and the common model of a couple relationship,” it says.

Where do I sign up?

Gay bookstore gets letter from Jesus

David Rimmer of After Stonewall says that running a gay bookshop allows him to meet interesting people. But Rimmer recently received a letter from someone a little out of the ordinary: Jesus.

“Do not deceive yourself. I, Jesus The Christ, the Eternal God, with My Father and with My Spirit, will not be mocked by those who believe the lies of homosexuality. I will not be mocked by those who think My Last Supper is a joke. I don’t care who you are or what your so-called laws and policies are, I AM the final word and the Eternal Judge of all that lives and dies.”

Rimmer put the letter in his window.

Sorry Mr. Jesus, but you absolutely will be mocked by those of us living in the reality-based world. I’m not sure what kind of Christian would forge a letter from Jesus (that’s got to be against one of the commandments, surely), or why Jesus would resort to using the mail, or why he would focus on one bookstore in Ottawa, but surely an aspect of the Creator of the Universe has lots of spare time on his hands, what with the whole ‘omnipotence’ thing.

I can write a million satirical articles, I can post essay after carefully-crafted essay, I can work my entire life and I will never do as much to discredit the religious establishment as the believers can with a single “from Jesus” letter. Sigh, it’s almost enough to make me think I should just give up…

Just kidding, this shit’s hilarious.

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George W. Bush misses the point, says something stupid

So George W. Bush is in the news again for saying something stupid. *Ho hum*

“‘I didn’t like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low.'”

So, to be clear. This is the president that presided over the September 11th terrorist attacks, two mismanaged wars in which thousands died, the largest expansion of government intrusion in history, directed smear campaigns and dirty tricks against political opponents, and watched as hundreds of thousands of people suffered in the wake of a hurricane. He was almost universally reviled by the international community, irretrievably tarnished the reputation of the United States, destroyed public schooling, and created a gag rule that denied health care to women all over the world. This is a man whose name is now synonymous with failure, ineptitude, stupidity, and hubris.

But being called racist was the low point of his presidency.

Hooooo boy!

This is part of the reason why I think the word racism needs to be redefined for accuracy. We use it to describe some kind of active hatred and violence against a group of people, when its contemporary face is far more insidious than that. I don’t doubt for a moment that George W. Bush doesn’t affirm white supremacy openly – I’m sure he thinks he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. However, his lack of response to the tragedy in Louisiana, and the lopsided, mismanaged, haphazard way in which his administration responded is a clear sign that he, and the rest of the people responsible, don’t give a flying fuck about black people. It’s the same lack of giving a fuck that makes 3,000 New Yorkers worth starting a war (two wars, really), but the hundreds of thousands of genocide victims in Sudan barely worth a ‘meh’.

I don’t think Mr. Bush is any more evil or racist than anyone else on the whole, he just believes in his own non-racism more deeply than someone like me does. He refuses to be self-critical about his motives when it comes to racial disparities, so convinced is he that he could not possibly be racist. And when his clearly-racist actions are identified as such, he retreats into the role of the victim – how dare he call me racist! The mature response to an accusation like that is to defend your position, but at the same time try and understand where the accusation is coming from. Kanye was spot on in his description, and if Mr. Bush had spent 2 seconds thinking about it, he’d see that too.

But of course, the word racism immediately shuts down rational thought (insert ‘George W. Bush is stupid’ joke here), and all parties try to climb the highest tree to avoid getting splashed by the racism floodwater (perhaps a tasteless allusion). Once we can discuss racism as a phenomenon and not a damming character trait, we can start to address it, and in that way improve the climate.

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Sweden doesn’t have a race problem

When I originally talked about Geert Wilders, the racist fuckhead who is on trial for being a racist fuckhead (which, while extremely objectionable, should not be a crime), I made a passing comment about Scandinavian socialist utopias. While it is undeniable that the quality of life is much better in those countries – due in no small part to the wide variety of the social programs available to the citizenry – they are not immune to the same brand of racist bullshit that is a problem everywhere else in the world:

Swedish police fear a lone gunman may be behind a spate of racially-motivated shootings in the southern city of Malmo. Detectives say they are linking up to 15 gun attacks in the city over the past year that have targeted people of immigrant background. The investigation comes amid growing tension in Sweden over immigration.

It appears as though Sweden is caught in the same fear-grip that allowed an asshole like Geert Wilders to gain political power in The Netherlands. And of course once you stoke fear to  a fevered level, and move the entire zeitgeist toward an anti-immigrant sentiment, eventually the nuts who were at the far right before find themselves embraced in the mainstream. With mainstream acceptance for stupid ideas comes a new re-drawing of where the fringe is. All of sudden, picking up a rifle and picking off a few members of the feared group no longer seems like such an unreasonable idea?

Don’t believe me? Ask Byron Williams, the so-called “progressive hunter“, who drew his inspiration to murder employees of an environmentalist philanthropic group from the implicit support of Fox News. When you stoke the fires of fear in the populace under the guise of “just asking questions”, you invite people to draw their own conclusions based on shitty evidence and innuendo. Invariably, people come to believe that they alone have pierced the veil of secrecy, and that violence is the only answer. That’s undoubtedly what’s happening in Sweden, a country that I otherwise have positive feelings about.

I have no such feelings about the Czech Republic, another country that clearly doesn’t have a race problem:

Four right-wing extremists in the Czech Republic have been jailed for an arson attack on a Roma family. The court in the eastern city of Ostrava handed down sentences of up to 22 years for racially motivated attempted murder. Three people were hurt when three Molotov cocktails were thrown into a Roma house in Vitkov on 19 April, 2009. One of the victims was a toddler who barely survived, suffering 80% burns on her body.

When we allow racist ideologies to take hold in our society, we pave the way for atrocities like this. When we soothe ourselves with the lie that racism isn’t a problem anymore, and that anti-racists are just whining about nothing, we lend tacit acceptance to those who think that there needs to be some kind of reprisal against racial minorities. The world has a race problem, and the longer we pretend it doesn’t, the worse it will get.

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