Edwin with Hand on the Foot of Jesus.

Thanks to the Mormons of Salt Lake City.

This is the first attempt by this blog to insert pictures or any kind of “media” other than type.

If this works, and you can see a photo of Edwin with his hand on the foot of Jesus, then it (whatever it is) did work and you can expect more blasphemous images from

Edwin.

On the Coming American Religious Civil War (ARCW). A Prophesy Re-visited.

ON THE COMING AMERICAN RELIGIOUS CIVIL WAR  (ARCW)

 

War is hell.  Little understood aphorism.

 

THIS MAY BE YOUR FIRST NOTICE OF THE COMING AMERICAN RELIGIOUS CIVIL WAR (ARCW). If so, you should date and preserve this warning.  Then your distant descendants (maybe the “Daughters of the ARCW”) can have something to be smug about–in the unlikely event that they, and this notice, survive the fires, and anybody can still read.

The ARCW has already been started by the superstitious. They call it a “civil war of values.”  The shooting has already started. They call that “protecting innocent life.” The purpose of the war is to overthrow  science and constitutional democracy and  to replace them with the Bronze Age myths and laws of ancient Iraq that became preserved in a collection of writings known, in translation, as “The Holy Bible.” They regard this undertaking as “bringing America back to God.” Loyal Americans should regard it as treason.

The effects of the stated ends of the traitors include: harming children by not teaching them about human sexuality; harming adults by irrationally circumscribing consensual sexual and reproductive freedom; harming democracy by imposing laws enforcing mythological interpretations of a supernatural being’s will; harming civilization by preventing inquiry and suppressing evidence that disproves the myths; harming human development by teaching that humans have a duty to live for some superstitious  spiritual world rather than for the world of flesh in which they happen to exist. The traitors do not view their teachings or methods as harmful, but neither did their pious ancestors who beat children and burned women alive for their own good.

The fanatics have declared war on reason and human progress. They have done this because they suffer from fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of American democracy and of the Bible.

History tells lies. It is important to understand this to understand the ARCW. A particularly harmful lie is that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation. The traitors truly believe this because it has been taught them since they colored pilgrims with crayons in church nursery school while their parents were in the sanctuary learning to be more judgmental. As the young bigots grew into adultery(sic), they accepted this teaching uncritically, just as they accepted that everything in the bible is true, and that science is wrong, if not evil, when it proves that humans have evolved from non-human life forms. The traitors should, in fairness, be permitted to prove the intensity of this mental abuse in their defense at the ARCW war crimes trials.

America was not established as a Christian nation. To the contrary, it was intentionally set up as a godless nation. That’s why no god or religion of any kind is mentioned in our Constitution. This was so important that it was memorialized in the first words of the first amendment to our Constitution, to wit, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of  religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” The people who started this country knew what religious war and holy terror was, and they wanted to be very clear that America was a democracy set up under human law, not religious authority or rule.  This was made exquisitely clear when, in a treaty with Tripoli, signed by President John Adams on June 10, 1797, the United Stated Senate unanimously declared, “…the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” That’s that, said the grammarian. People who don’t like the American way, and think church and state should not be separated, really ought to move to Serbia where they can kill and rape non-believers with impunity.

The traitors who push the ARCW think they are doing god’s will by trying to force their sacred texts and prejudices on those who want to dance to other celestial music or simply stay  home Sunday mornings and brush the cat. Before our Constitution, several states made criminals of people who didn’t attend the right church, or, whisper the thought, did not attend holy services at all. Some very wise people made us a nation where it is legal to stay home with the cat. If we want to keep it that way, it is necessary to win the ARCW.

 As the believers, who think the fault is in the stars and not in themselves, are waging the ARCW on many fronts, thus on many fronts must freedom be defended.  Particularly valuable allies can be found among Christians who find attempts to force their foot into someone else’s shoe offensive. After all, if the existence and will of any god were clearly known, there would be no need for faith or debate. No one seriously doubts that objects fall down if dropped, but there is  murderous dispute over beliefs that cannot be proved as convincingly as gravity.

This is a wake up call.  Don’t press the snooze alarm.  The barbarians are at the gates, and, because they encourage breeding beyond the ability of the breeders to house, feed, and educate the breedees, violence and social disorganization continue. As the most Christian nation on earth watches its civilization dissolve like a Dove bar fallen off of that ark, attempts to enforce irrational superstitious solutions will accelerate. That Branch Davidian thing was a sample. Lots of other messiahs are waiting. Maybe we can have court ordered Branch Davidian Social Services counseling for people who won’t share their wives with god’s anointed.  Maybe courts can acquit murderers if they believe god’s finger was on their trigger.  Maybe the barbarians will actually succeed in assuring that books, pictures, ideas, doctors, judges and military commanders share their vision. Then we will have a lot of interesting tribal warfare.  One useful defense will be humanistic hermeneutics.

“Hermeneutics” is a fancy word for biblical interpretation.  When religious types want to make something simple sound holy and mysterious, they often give it an important sounding high falutin’ name. This practice contrasts sharply with the usage of secular humanists, who, in explaining their views, employ simple words, that fall trippingly from the tongue, like “eupraxophy.”

Hermeneutics can be an important weapon to use against religious fanatics in the coming ARCW. The hard core nut cases– those who would control every aspect of our lives by forcing us to accept their understanding of the will of their god–tend to share certain operational assumptions.  These include the belief that:

1) Every word of the bible is true.

2) The English translation of the bible authorized by King James the First of England, completed in 1611, Common Era, is the only fully acceptable, authoritative, and inspired-by-god translation of holy scripture.  This translation is accurate in every respect, including punctuation marks.

3) The bible is the basis of all morality. Without it there can be no morality.

4) The United States of America was established, and should be governed, according to biblical principles.

5) The bible is without error.

6) No part of the bible is in conflict with, or contradictory to, any other part.

7) Hermeneutics can be used to clarify and explain those truths of god in the bible that might appear, to finite minds, to be in conflict.  The goal of hermeneutics is to reconcile all portions of the word of god (the bible) into a seamless, complete, infallible, and final statement of all past and future history (the latter is called “prophecy”), of divine law, and of how humans should behave and understand morality.  The bible, properly interpreted, is the final word on everything.

Ignorance, while regrettable, can lead to some interesting discussions.  As an example of how hermeneutics works, one gospel tells us Judas hanged himself after betraying Jesus.  Another gospel says Judas threw himself off a cliff.  Proper interpretation, guided by the holy spirit, reveals this to mean Judas hanged himself over a cliff.  Then the rope, or branch, broke, and Judas fell down the cliff.  If the author of the “Song of Solomon” in the bible appears to drool over a woman’s breasts, this is not to be understood in some sexual sense that would keep the bible out of family friendly libraries, but rather as a poetic metaphor of Christ’s love for his church. See, it’s really quite simple.

Fanatics feel that only the godless and the immoral could possibly understand the bible as a collection of diverse literary myths, sexy stories, primitive laws, and biased histories, unconnected in their presentation, and unworthy of belief in their totality.  Such true believers are quite satisfied with the famous refutation of reason of the early Christian church, “I believe it because it is absurd.”

The problem is that they are not content to believe what they want and let others believe, or not believe, as they choose.  The ARCW they have declared has the avowed purpose of making our democracy one nation under their idea of god.  This is treason in its purest and most virulent form.

America was not founded on biblical principles.  There is nothing in the bible about democracy.  Democracy was invented in Greece, some five hundred years before Jesus.  It was overwhelmed for centuries in religious bloodbaths of kings and emperors, and, with minor exceptions, disappeared from human affairs until it was rediscovered and memorialized in the Constitution of the United States of America.  To insure that dictators and priests would be kept forever at bay, after much debate, our Constitution was consciously created as a godless document that established a wholly secular state.  Love it or leave it.

The religious fanatics who are traitors to our way of life must be stopped before their un-American attempts to replace our democracy with their mythology causes the ARCW to become a shooting war.  Using their principles of hermeneutics, their own book can become a powerful weapon against them in ways reasonable people (including most Christians) can understand.

The bible contains a relatively limited vocabulary when compared with the great contemporary literary works of Greek and Roman writers. The style is also awkward by comparison.  One might argue the a work dictated by god should be expected to be better than the writings of heathens, but, alas, it is not.  There are no original ideas or thoughts in the bible.  Much of it is plagiarized from Egyptian and Babylonian sources.  There is little that passes for morality as we understand it.  Slavery is condoned, as is the murder of children of non-believers; a rebellious son should be stoned to death, and women are to be totally subjugated to men.  A man could have many wives in the Old Testament.  If it is argued that the New Testament created a “new covenant” wherein only one wife is permitted, we might wonder if the changeless god changed his mind.  If so, how can every word of the Old Testament be taken as the will of god?

From a search of the sacred text itself, using a computerized King James Bible, available in Christian bookstores, we discover that the following words do not appear in the bible:  cooperate; cooperation; moral; traditional; values; rational; rights; morals; independence; congress; compromise; progress; republic; republican; democrat; democracy; insight; morality; jury; vote; test; due process; consequences; coincidence; parliament; majority; minority; constitution; achievement; aspire; human; invention; explore; discovery; humanity; humanism; university; universe; homosexual; fairness; harmony; treaty; logic; sexuality; abort; abortion; fetus; poet; poetry; artist; creativity.

If the bible is the foundation of morality and our way of life, we are in serious trouble indeed.  If the ARCW is lost, we will have no need for those omitted words.

Ed Kagin

August, 1995

AMERICAN ATHEISTS TO FLY ATHEIST BANNER AT SUPER BOWL

American Atheists, Inc.
February 3, 2012
AMERICAN ATHEISTS, INC.

For more information, please contact:
Dave Silverman, President 732-648-9333
Blair Scott, Communications Director 256-701-6265 

An Atheist civil rights group announced today that it will be flying an airplane banner on Super Bowl Sunday around Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. The banner will read “Football beats church anytime – atheists.org.” The banner is scheduled to be in the air from 9:30-11:30 AM local time.

 

Dave Silverman, President of American Atheists, stated, “We took advantage of a unique opportunity to remind many Americans that their religion is not as important as they like to pretend it is. In many cities around the country the running joke is that football is the most popular religion.”

 

Mr. Silverman continued, “The banner will be seen by thousands of tailgaters, who clearly agree with American Atheists since they chose to sit on a tailgate instead of a pew. They chose to party with friends instead of praying with preachers.”

 

American Atheists notes that statistically speaking there will be more atheists in Lucas Oil Stadium than Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists combined and doubled.

 

American Atheists sends a special welcome to the atheists attending the Super Bowl in Indianapolis. The organization also extends an invitation to atheist fans to attend the Reason Rally and American Atheists Convention in Washington, DC this March, both of which will be even more fun than a football game.

 

Blair Scott, Communications Director for American Atheists, said, “There are thousands of Super Bowl related employees working on the Sabbath, which according to the Bible is a sin worthy of being stoned to death. Our desire to be entertained on Sundays puts a lot of Americans to work, but Christian mythology dictates that these American workers are doomed to hell.”

 

In addition to the 70,000 fans sitting in the bleachers at Lucas Oil Stadium, it is estimated that 130 million fans will watch the Super Bowl this Sunday. Based on available statistics, 20 million of those viewers will be atheists: enjoying their Sunday without church.

 

AMERICAN ATHEISTS is a national non-profit 501(c)3 organization that defends civil rights for Atheists and other nonbelievers; works for the total separation of church-mosque-temple and state; and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy.

American Atheists, Inc.PO Box 158Cranford, NJ 07016

Tel: (908) 276-7300

Fax: (908) 276-7402

KENTUCKY HAM SONG, or On the Founder of that Great Nonsense, the “Creation Museum” in Northern Kentucky

KENTUCKY HAM SONG, or On the Founder of that Great Nonsense, the “Creation Museum” in Northern Kentucky

 

(May be sung to sorta a combination of “Davy Crockett” & “the Beverly Hillbillies”)

Hear the story of Kenneth Ham

Australian huckster slick as jam

Left the creationists at El Cajon

To try to make a fortune out at old Big Bone

 

Kentucky has a state park called Big Bone Lick

Where Ken planned something really sick

Tried to teach “creation science” near those fossil finds

To get little children not to use their minds

 

Here’s what Ken says we should believe

Every kind of living thing lived with Adam and Eve

Forget proof and science and believe Ken’s news

On the Ark there were dinosaurs and kangaroos

 

Ken’s creationists are just plain wrong

We know evolution worked hard and long

Until us humans could evolve a brain

That could keep our minds and money out of Ken Ham’s drain
 

CHORUS:

 

Science deals with problems it sometimes solves

And sometimes finds new truths such as life evolves

Creationists have no questions and no need to look

The answer to every question is in Ken Ham’s book

 

Edwin  Kagin

 

Conceived Again

Conceived Again

I understood I was conceived,

And born, in original sin;

And preachers said, and I believed,

I must be born again.

 

But I really sought to know,

And hoped to clarify,

Just what I must do to go

To Heaven when I die.

 

I’d heard baptism and rebirth

Would start my life anew,

So when I left this sinful earth

I’d join the righteous few.

 

But knowing all of that, from God

There came unto me this perception:

Being born again is very odd

If life starts at conception.

 

If I became me when conceived,

I was already me at birth;

So what has any second birth achieved?

What can being born again be worth?

 

We sinners all must be reconceived

So Heaven we can win!

This is the great truth I have received,

We must be conceived again!

 

I know not just how this can be done–

Our creeds will need revision.

But there’s a Heaven to be won,

So make a reconceived decision!

 

Come ye all, and be again conceived;

Be reconceived to be reprieved;

Don’t be born again deceived;

Second birth has not thy sin relieved;

Ye must be reconceived!

 

So consider theology as a whole

And make thee thy selection–

To elevate thy immortal soul

By election or erection.

 

Edwin Kagin (c) 2012

On Religion as a Public Health Threat.

KAGIN’S COLUMN

                                   ON RELIGION AS A PUBLIC HEALTH THREAT

 My own view on religion is that of Lucretius.  I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.   Bertrand Russell

 

The Christian Religion produces in many followers a kind of mass psychosis.  Belief in fundamentalist dogma is a contagious, addictive disease that destroys all thought that might challenge the delusional system.  The disease is so virulent and destructive to affected believers that it threatens the extinction of the human species through overpopulation, and must also be understood as a threat to the mental health of the public.

Christianity teaches an infantile belief in imaginary places and imaginary friends.  Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Angels, Satan et al travel from Heaven and Hell to visit Earth, perform miracles, impregnate Earth girls, and teach that we are doomed for eternity if we prefer being alive in this world to being entombed in a scriptural world.  Contentment is reserved for those who have died for Christ.  Everyone else if cosmic flotsam.

Rather than remain silently smug in the knowledge they are saved and all non-believers are damned, Christians attempt to make all human beings play in their sandbox and to agree with their fantasy world.  It really does make an enormous difference in how adults view the world if they were humanistically reared or if they were raised to think like children: to believe that a magical Being magically made everything, including them; that the purpose of their lives is to worship and obey the magical Creator so they can be with the Creator after they die in a magical place called Heaven, and that the Creator raised his magical Son from the dead– after killing him as a blood sacrifice for their otherwise irreversibly shamed and debased nature.  This is a message guaranteed to scramble your mind.

Fanatical believers in this system recognize a duty to force others to believe it.  This is a threat to the public’s psychological health.  Of course the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution permits the free exercise of religion.  But the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact.  If we can, through law, try to protect the public from itself by regulating smoking, alcohol consumption, and sale of firearms, surely we have the constitutional power and duty as Americans to defend the wall between church and state and to protect freedom of conscience from the force of ancient myths.

Fundagelicals are pounding their battering rams at the wall of separation and at the pillars of democracy.  They want people to surrender their personal power to them and share their pathological illness.  They have seen many changes and have been against every one of them.  What a difference it might make if their one life was seen as one to live for growth in relationships and for the discovery of knowledge that permits something beyond groveling before non-existent, capricious gods.

Our species may well be in a transitional evolutionary phase wherein we either use our minds to survive or become extinct in consequence of idiotic religious behavior.  Easter Island is a tidy little microcosm.  Space was limited.  Islands are that way.  The people destroyed themselves, their civilization and their environment by overbreeding and internecine wars.  Religion was their fatal disease.  It might be ours.

We might have settled the stars by now, but we have wasted the lifespace of our species with such nonsense as mythically believing God wants sex used only for making babies.  This defect in rational though alone has produced tragedy for countless humans.

Despite overwhelming evidence that uncontrolled population growth will destroy the human race as it destroyed Easter Island, certain Christians will kill you if you believe in preventing this through contraception and abortion.  That Pope, J2P2, has canceled a visit to the U.S.  He is piqued because the U.S. didn’t support his deadly doctrine, at the world population control conference in Cairo, that population should be controlled by using no population control.  Clearly, religion is a threat to public health.

Christians display another dead give-away symptom of an addictive disease — denial.  Facts are not facts.  Believers have not committed provable crimes.  They are afraid of dying, and rather than deal with it, they invent a make believe world that Pliny described to the Roman Emperor Trajan (1st century, Common Era) as “an absurd and extravagant superstition.”  He further observed, “In fact, this contagious superstition is not confined to the cities only, but has spread its infection among the neighboring villages and country.”  Pliny saw it coming.

The ancient terrors are still here.  The disease continues to threaten democracy, personal freedom, and life itself.  How can it be controlled?  The Chinese have a neat criminal law punishing theft by superstition.  That might help.  So might taxing religion and using their money for repairing their damages.  Religious practices could be limited to certain times and places and be scrupulously kept out of public life.  Under no circumstances should impressionable children be exposed to religious beliefs until they no longer believe in Santa Claus.  Religion must be rated R.  Reason is an effective inoculation.

Religious bigots must be exposed.  They don’t like being called bigots, but they are.  “Bigot” is defined in the New Little Oxford Dictionary as an “obstinate and intolerant adherent of creed or view.”  Yup, that’s them.  They don’t like what they perceive as “religion bashing” either.  This, in their diseased view, is what occurs when potential victims refuse to consent, and fight back.

Would a rational, caring God really endorse what Christians believe?  Fundagelicals are right when they say they are at war with atheists.  If you are fond of freedom, you’d better pray the atheists win.

Edwin Kagin