It’s another long travel day for me, so you’ll just have to settle for a little video for a while. I agree so damned hard with this message that it is a suitable proxy.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Pokemon is nothing. When I was a kid, we had Dungeons & Dragons…now that was evil!
I love Thunderf00t’s videos. He’s terrific. Except I can’t get through this one, owing to utter cringing embarrassment for those poor deluded people. Seriously, just I can’t do it. Excruciating. Carry on, Thunderf00t! Wish I was made of stronger stuff. See you all at the Reason Rally!
The whole concept of infant salvation boggles me in relation to the idea that abortion is murder. If all infants and children unable to be “saved” are automatically saved if they die or are killed before baptism and/or “acceptance of Jesus into their heart,” (I shivered writing that) then shouldn’t abortion be encouraged?
After seeing this nonsense, I now find it easy to believe the unbelievable. Are there intelligent persons among those people? What is intelligence anyway? Greeting,
Federico
What’s wrong with masturbating in a group? (Provided everyone in the group consents, of course)
More than that, it would mean that you have a moral obligation to kill as many children as you can. A child killed is a child saved.
In fact, refusal to kill a child is selfish. When you refuse to kill a child, what you’re saying is that your salvation is more important than theirs.
Then, once you’ve killed one child, you’re already damned. It can’t possibly get any worse for you, so you might as well start killing more children. It won’t do you any harm, but it will give them a free ride into heaven.
That would be true self-sacrifice. It would even outdo the sacrifice of Jesus, since he got to come back after three days. You’d be going to hell forever (or oblivion or whatever, depending on the specific theology) for another person’s benefit.
If you accept infant salvation, you also have to accept that the killing of a child is the most perfect expression of self-sacrificing love that any person could ever exhibit.
@LykeX
Hell, I’d say that if you went out of your way sending dozens of children to heaven by murdering them, you’d probably earn yourself a free pass with the Christian god. We all know he’s really into that whole senseless killing schtick, so he’d probably make you a saint or an angel or something.
William Craig Lane is trying to justify how his pet deity is moral when, according to the propaganda that Lane believes in, the deity acts in obviously and totally immoral ways.
I swear, religious people look like such idiots. And what horrible child abuse to indoctrinate your children into your idiocy so that they, too, can look like idiots. Don’t these people realize just how silly they look?
Question: When pentecostals hold their arms up in the air, do they have to hold their palms in a parabolic shape to properly focus the prayer waves?
@Rip Steakface
There’s certainly an argument to be made that since it’s such a selfless act and since it confers upon the children the highest possible benefit, it can’t really be sinful.
However, I was looking at it from the perspective of the inevitable christian response of, “but killing would be a sin, so we can’t do that.” My point was that even if it’s a sin, if you love your children you should still do it.
On that whole point, I wonder why WLC tries to defend this doctrine. Whatever else you might say about him, he’s not stupid. Surely he can’t be unaware of the inevitable conclusion that follows from his position.
Maybe we can chalk it up to the amazing ability of people to hold mutually contradictory ideas in their mind without noticing that there’s a problem.
Presumably he’s talking about one of the Old Testament moments when the Israelites slaughter babies of another tribe. A conservative Christian once explained to me that God knew these babies would grow up to be enemies of the Jews and so He ordered the massacre. As enemies of the Jews the infants would have ended up in hell anyhow (that’s the Christian, not the Jewish interpretation), thus slaughtering these babies deprived them of their free choice to reject the obviously superior message of YHWH and therefore choose to burn in hell for all eternity, hence, doing babies a favor.
It doesn’t extend to all babies–you see, God hasn’t told us lesser mortals which babies are going to grow up to be atheists, and only God can deprive us of our free choice to burn like charred marshmallows.
“Being with people is good.” Ummm, no, mostly, & especially when they’re all jigging up & down like that.
Child salvation was the perfect set up for the Israelite priests. When attacking and wiping out competing tribes, the priests had to cajole their followers into kill everyone. The men and older women, not so much a problem. The young girls, take them, they are yours. The babies and really young children were a problem. So hey, you are saving them, You are sending them to the Lord. Problem solved, and go to it.
christinelaing @12
That’s exactly how I’d attempt to get out of the whole mess. You can only kill whom god commands dead. Then it’s not a sin, see?
Here’s the soundtrack to WLC’s “merciful” massacre.
So…demons are stupid?
Glen Davidson
Emotional masturbation is so successful as an apologetic because people are so eager to think that if it works, then it must be real — there must have been a partner there all along … somehow. They confuse the objective and subjective aspects of feeling good. You can know you feel good; therefore, you must be able to be equally certain about what you think you’re feeling good about. The sense of God’s immanence is conflated with God’s existence. You orgasmed: ergo, He was there.
A lot of religious ecstasy looks like the throes of sexual passion. They’re related, I think.
yiab @ #5,
I understand that Socrates did, & he came to a sticky end
A lot of religious ecstasy looks like a Three Stooges Curly Shoulder Spin.
Either that or a gran mal seizure.
Orwell was pretty much saying that in the 1940s. His thoughts were more directed towards totalitarian regimes, but it’s obvious how cults of personality are, well, just like cults. And that mainstream religions are just big cults. Ya dig?
Anybody here listen to The Good Atheist podcast? They have a few clips they use as leadins/leadouts. One is some woman preacher speaking in tongues. Another is the same woman (I think) saying something like “Covered in the blood of Jesus. In Jesus’ name. In Jesus’ name.”
I’m sure this is from another loony bin session with goombots writhing on the floor in religious ecstasy. But the language elicits images of a horror movie. Every time this clip comes on I picture Carrie standing on the prom stage dripping with pig blood.
Add to it the religious fascination with wearing small depictions of torture devices, and you can see that these people are not well.
@Rip Steakface #20:
I was about to say the same thing. There’s a line in 1984 where Julia says that The Party bottles up sex because sex lets you feel good in yourself, and that makes it unneccesary to care about the propaganda frenzy and the Two Minutes Hate and all that rot. The lust gets sublimated into devotion to Big Brother…or being On Fire for God.
Yes indeed – very powerful. Not to change the subject or anything, I came across the following on YouTube: http://youtu.be/XW9SfVcZEGE Watch it.
@#13
“Ummm, no, mostly, & especially when they’re all jigging up & down like that.”
Actually, the jiggling part- or parts- can be lots of fun.
mmmmm….jiggling
OMG, the godbots really do say, “Mericuns” instead of “Americans.”
I did like the claim that god was out in the crops fightin’ the devil.
My comment @25 was referring to the video mentioned in comment #23, and not to the Thunderfoot video.
I will say one thing about the charismatic, all fall down religious events: it looks everyone gets some exercise.
Lynna, I went to something similar to those we-all-fall-down events with a friend, way back in my younger year. I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the whole room who wasn’t feeling the “joy,” and had to consciously choose to lie on the ground and close my eyes lest I stick out like a sore thumb. I think I was even a bit scared, since I had no idea what I was supposed to do besides lie on the ground quietly.
ThundefOOt left out the two best parts of this imaginary best friend. He agrees with everything you think, say and do. And he is the biggest bully on the block, so you can make everyone else agree with everything you think, say and do, or he will beat them up forever.
WLC claims that children under 7 get an automatic pass to heaven. I don’t know where in the bible he gets that, but lets pretend it’s true and work through it.
Two thousand years ago, an Israelite army wipes out a Canaanite village. How do they know which kids are under 7? Do they check their birth certificates? What if a kid is 6 years, 10 months old. O.K. to kill. What if they invaded 4 months later. The kid is 7 years, 2 months old. Kill him and he has been sent of to eternal torment. Well, he is old enough to know the OTG (one true god) and have rejected him and so he deserves his damnation. Really??!!
How did this kid learn about the OTG living in a Canaanite village? Has god been sending prophets to them, and this 7 year old spurned their words? Well, no, because god has been spending his time hanging with the Israelites, his chosen people.
Even if the kid had heard about the OTG, how could he have worshiped him by the proscribed laws. Was he supposed to build his own temple and sacrifice lambs to him?
What WLC says is just a pile of rationalizations, with no foundation, so he can believe the bible is literally true while pretending both it and god are moral.
There have been studies using fMRI imagery showing the exact same area of the brain lighting up during both religious and sexual ecstasy. So, religion=sex. It also may explain why sex should be regulated. All that passion needs to be directed to gawd, not other people.
Julia Sweeney has a very funny line in Letting Go of God where she hints at what she did when alone in her room while looking at the big poster of Jesus.
Rip Steakface @ 3;
Never forget the fundie sacrament of hypocrisy – life is only ‘sacred’ and ‘inviolate’ before birth, when the embryo can be used to control women and deny them their bodily autonomy. Once the child is born, it’s open season – just another
potential dupe‘soul’ to begulled into unthinking, slave-like obedience‘saved’ or, failing that, to be killed out of hand. Afterall, once they are dead you can let god sort them out!*Hitchens was right – religion really does poison everything. I myself referred to it as the ‘swiss army knife of delusions’ in an earlier thread, and I hold to that description. Religious delusion is nothing if not useful to the clerical, patriarchal authority structure – it can be adpated to justify pretty much anything; from lying about evolution, through conning the gullible out of what little money they have while claiming the moral high ground, to declaring the cold-blooded murder of children to be an ‘infinite moral good’**.
Religion really is the ultimate long-con – the grifter’s holy grail.
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* I always have to remind myself tha there are still, to this day, xians who honestly do think like that. It boggles the mind, but it is true.
** Not to mention covering up child rape and thereby facilitating further child rape, lying about condoms and thereby directly contributing to the spread of HIV/AIDS and thus indirectly causing hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, and demonising homosexuals while refusing all responsibility when theose people are driven to suicide among countless other horrors too numerous to list here.
Masturbating in groups is just fine, so long as all are consenting adults…though anything done in groups does tend to have a coercing effect, and some people will end up feeling like they have an obligation to participate even when they don’t really want to.
of course Pokemon is evil! it was designed to bilk children out of their money.
Oh, and : “Beelzebub! I Choose You!”
Jesus loves you, he’s just not ready to commit. But he’s a jealous god, and wants you to only derive good feelings from him. Thus, anything that otherwise produces good feelings — sex, dancing, movies, books that aren’t the bible, a good wank… all that has to be Evil and must therefore be shunned.
I think this of all things shows the bubble of self-satisfied solipsism Craig and his ilk live in.
Newsflash, Billy boy: in the time when these things supposedly took place, there was no concept of heaven or hell as you understand it! Furthermore, the idea of salvation for the infant and young child is relatively new; just read some of the Puritan-era literature (or indeed, Great Awakening descriptions of “reprobate infants”) for proof.
He’s not only arrogant, ignorant, and solipsistic, he’s theologically illiterate. More than anything else, leaving aside all emotional appeals like “How can you condone genocide?” it’s this bullshit that makes me lose all respect for him. Can’t even remember his own lines! I bet if he died and did see God, he’d smack him in the face with the bible.