A death in Uganda

Uganda is currently undergoing conflict over civil rights: a number of influential Christians in the country, under the influence of American evangelicals like Scott Lively and Rick Warren, have been pushing to have homosexuality condemned and people who love other people of the same sex arrested or executed. It’s an ugly place where the dreams of the Christian right are actually being realized, but of course our evangelical leaders are denying their responsibility. Just last night on CNN I caught a bit of a nauseating interview with Joel Osteen, the smirking prosperity gospel pitchman, and he came right out and smilingly declared homosexuality a sin…but his wife just loves Elton John, so it’s all OK. Rick Warren is also similarly a moral coward who will happily trigger the landslide, but refuses to involve himself in the consequences.

But Warren won’t go so far as to condemn the legislation itself. A request for a broader reaction to the proposed Ugandan anti-homosexual laws generated this response: “The fundamental dignity of every person, our right to be free, and the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator. However, it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations.” On Meet the Press this morning, he reiterated this neutral stance in a different context: “As a pastor, my job is to encourage, to support. I never take sides.” Warren did say he believed that abortion was “a holocaust.” He knows as well as anyone that in a case of great wrong, taking sides is an important thing to do.

Our good, kind, sinner-loving, sin-hating Christianist monsters have more blood on their hands now. David Kato, a Ugandan civil rights leader who fought for tolerance for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people, has been beaten to death. This event followed after many death threats, and after the publication of a hit list in a local magazine.

The fight against the bill has also pushed Ugandan activists to the fore, raising concern for their privacy and safety. These deepened in late 2010 when a local tabloid called Rolling Stone, unconnected to the US magazine, published pictures, names, and residence locations of some members of the LGBT community, along with a headline saying, “Hang Them.” Kato’s photo appeared on the cover, and inside another photo appeared with his name.

Couple religious certainty and an atmosphere in which religious leaders are assuring everyone that certain people are less than human, damned, or criminal, and this is what you get: vigilante injustice. And Uganda loses another force for justice and humanity.

Australians are laughing at us Americans!

It’s shocking. How dare they. The Australian writes about our puritanical television viewers and how British television has to be stripped of religious criticism before it’s aired here, or our citizens get all Muslim-cartoon-rioter over it.

It’s not as if those real Americans are pretending to be thin-skinned. This is not faux outrage. They are genuinely shocked that outsiders do not take Christianity as seriously as they do.

Oh, yeah? We’re thin-skinned zealots from the land where “God can’t take a joke”? We’ll teach you what’s funny. The cruise missiles and predator drones are standing by on our aircraft carriers.

(Hmm. That would be funnier if it weren’t a little bit true.)

Christians depict Christians as delusional

A few Christians are indignant over this video mocking Pollyannaish theology.

Unfortunately for them, and to our increased mirth, their excuses are just as ridiculous as Suzie.

Dr. Normal L. Geisler, author of If God, Why Evil?, said the video contains a lot of misconceptions.

“You look at all of that [and] you sympathize with Susie because you think they (disasters, illnesses, etc.) are evil,” he said. “But if it’s evil, then there must be a standard for good. If there is a crooked line in this world then there must be a straight line. If there is a straight line then there must be God.”

Actually, I don’t sympathize with Suzie at all. The whole point of this video is that she’s silly and clueless.

I do have a standard for good: does it cause me or others harm? If not, it’s good. If it does, it’s bad. I don’t need a god to define this for me; humans are the yardstick. The existence of straight and crooked lines do not imply the existence of intent, but only that there are lines.

The video also gives a very limited picture of God’s presence in Suzie’s life, said Geisler, who is a Christian apologist and philosopher. When it comes to Suzie’s recovery from sickness, for example, the video fails to acknowledge that God is the one who designed her body with properties to heal naturally, said Geisler.

BECAUSE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT A GOD DESIGNED HER BODY. Jebus, he’s a philosopher…you’d think he’d be competent to recognize a circular argument when he saw one. There are alternative explanations with evidence in their support for the presence of self-repair mechanisms in evolved organisms, you know, so just point to the fact that someone can heal is not automatic evidence for the existence of a magic man in the sky.

The title of this article at the Christian Post is “Atheist Depicts Christians as Delusional”. Yeah? Depiction confirmed.

Governor of Alabama apologizes…sorta

Robert Bentley must have been feeling some political heat. After openly announcing his sectarian bias in a MLK Day speech, Bentley has offered a not-pology.

If anyone from other religions felt disenfranchised by the language, I want to say I am sorry. I am sorry if I offended anyone in any way.

Jebus, but I hate that poor excuse for an apology. It happens all the time; someone says something stupid and wrong, and instead of saying, “I was wrong, I’m sorry and will try to change,” they say, “I’m sorry you were offended by my remarks” — suddenly, the problem lies not in the error of the speaker but in the sensitivity of the listener.

That’s not an apology. It’s a transparent attempt to twist the blame to fall on everyone else but the person who made the mistake.

Even that’s too generous: this wasn’t a mistake. Bentley was honestly and intentionally expressing his views, as he has said, “speaking as an evangelical Christian to fellow Baptists.” The man sincerely believes that his fellow superstitious louts are his special brothers and sisters who he has been elected to serve, and the riff-raff who don’t go to his church are of lesser consideration.

That’s what he needed to apologize for, and correct. He doesn’t need to apologize for people finding offense in his stupidity and bias.

He especially doesn’t need to apologize for that because pandering to a smug majority is what got him elected in the first place.

Oops, I think that letter was supposed to be burned

An interesting letter has been unearthed. It reveals that the Vatican was officially instructing its clergy to hide pedophilia cases from civil authorities.

Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II’s diplomat to Ireland, the letter instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory “gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature.”

Storero wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, “must be meticulously followed.” Any bishops who tried to impose punishments outside the confines of canon law would face the “highly embarrassing” position of having their actions overturned on appeal in Rome, he wrote.

Child-abuse activists in Ireland said the 1997 letter demonstrates that the protection of pedophile priests from criminal investigation was not only sanctioned by Vatican leaders but ordered by them.

“The letter is of huge international significance, because it shows that the Vatican’s intention is to prevent reporting of abuse to criminal authorities. And if that instruction applied here, it applied everywhere,” said Colm O’Gorman, director of the Irish chapter of human rights watchdog Amnesty International.

Yeah, I have serious reservations of a moral character about the Catholic church, that’s for sure.

I am bemused by the threat that if a church dared to invoke civil authorities to protect the children in their charge from rapacious priests, their actions would be overturned by the Vatican. Is that basically saying that if locals do anything other than work with the Vatican to quarantine child-rapers, the Vatican will do whatever they can to put the rapist right back into his position? Sweet. They really don’t care at all about their congregations, do they?

But I don’t think I want to be this bigot’s brother

The Republican governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, has moved on a little bit from the 1950s — he made a speech on Martin Luther King Day in which he declared himself colorblind and the governor of all the people of Alabama. How nice! But then, unfortunately, he had to ruin it by making a few exceptions.

But if you have been adopted in God’s family like I have, and like you have if you’re a Christian and if you’re saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister.

Now I will have to say that, if we don’t have the same daddy, we’re not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.

Gosh. I guess Christians in Alabama are just extra-special people. The rest of us — Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, Hindus, animists, whatever — not so much.

Isn’t it just amazing that the governor of a secular state would stand up and unabashedly make a speech declaring a specific religious group as having a privileged status with him?