God hates dogs?

This story is nice and sad at the same time. At an Anglican church in Canada, a parishioner attended with his dog, went up to take communion and his pet followed him, and after giving the man the magic cookie, the priest placed a communion wafer on the dog’s tongue, too. Hey, he was just waiting there with his tongue hanging out, it was the most natural thing to do. Unfortunately, and entirely predictably, some prissy-pants whiner in the congregation didn’t like it.

Days later, the church and diocese received a complaint from one parishioner, who felt the church offended the sacred ritual. The bread and wine are meant to represent the body and blood of Jesus Christ and are only to be given to those who have been baptized.

It’s a cracker. Come on. I’d rather make one dog happy than please all the dogmatists in the world.

And these speculations as rationalizations annoy me.

“In his email, the man’s argument was that Christ wouldn’t have liked it,” said Needham. “But in my opinion, Christ would have thought it was neat. It was just being human. And it made everyone smile.”

Face it, your god is simply a projection of your own personality and beliefs. He isn’t there. If you like dogs, you’ll imagine that your god likes dogs; if you think noisy smelly animals are a nuisance, your god bars the gates of heaven to them.

Mel Gibson is a product of his sick ideology

Christopher Hitchens addresses the latest media meltdown by Mel Gibson. It’s great stuff; people are making all these excuses for him, that he’s not really a racist, he’s not really violent, he’s not really a misogynist, he’s not really a loathsome wackjob…but Hitchens cuts through it all.

This is extraordinary. We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church.

And then he follows up with damning examples from Gibson’s father and Gibson’s own actions.

It adds a fresh new perspective to all those fans of Gibson’s labor of love, The Passion, a sadistic piece of bloody anti-semitism. What Gibson rages about in (imagined) private and what he put on the screen in that movie are awfully hard to separate. One of Gibson’s most ardent defenders is right-wing Catholic kook Bill Donohue:

Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? And I’m not afraid to say it. That’s why they hate this movie. It’s about Jesus Christ, and it’s about truth. It’s about the messiah.

And Donohue is still flogging this line against anyone who criticizes Gibson:

[Frank] Rich is particularly angry at anyone who dares to mention the role played by secular Jews in fomenting anti-Catholicism. I am one Catholic who will not run from this charge. It is painfully obvious, that most of the anti-Catholicism that exists today comes from two major sources: ex-Catholics (and those with one foot out the door) and secular Jews.

It’s a disorder that isn’t restricted to Catholicism, though; the other recent expression of these anti-semitic views is none other than Glenn Beck.

Jesus conquered death. He wasn’t victimized. He chose to give his life. He did have a choice. If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would have come back from the dead and made the the Jews pay for what they did.

Any day now they’ll be talking about blood libel. Isn’t it time now to stop pussy-footing around? These people are anti-semitic proto-fascists, their prejudices propped up by truly weird religious beliefs.

Stop the Stoning of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

If you do nothing else. Please take a moment and sign the Petition.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/stop…
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/s…

Contact information for e-mailing the White house.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

And the President of Iran
http://cp.president.ir/en/

His e-mail (possibly)
[email protected]
http://www.siawi.org/article882.html

And some other details that might help
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/s…
Currently there are only 427 signatures on this site. I am sure there are other Petitions out there. I think making people aware is the most important thing. That and voicing our condemnation of this sentence.

This woman needs to be released.

What is it with the Sacred Lube?

It’s just one of those freakish religious practices I cannot comprehend, this strange “anointing” of heads and objects with oil. Why? Does their god just like his targets greased up? It’s especially inappropriate when a teacher regularly rubs magic lubricants onto her students.

A Norfolk teacher has resigned after it was discovered she was rubbing “holy oil” on students and their desks during school, a Norfolk Public Schools spokesperson said.

How stupid. Everyone knows that, in order to be effective, the proper way to bless the students is to decapitate a chicken at the lectern, and then swing it around your head by its feet to splatter the kiddies. At least the ones who aren’t crying afterwards will be very focused on everything you do.

The Vatican must have some framing experts on staff

They’ve done it again. They’ve declared that the ordination of women is as heinous a crime as raping children, simultaneously minimizing the trauma of child-rape and maximizing the insult to women. I don’t know how they do it. The Catholic church is rich, they’ve got a lot of very smart people suckered into their dogma, and they’ve been the voice of religion in the West for one and half millennia. How can they be so godawful horrible at this?

And then I realized it’s the 21st century, they’ve got lots of money, so they probably have communications experts all over the place. As we all know, the one strategy they all have is to suck up to their audience and never make them uncomfortable with new ideas, so when the Pope or a cardinal consults them on some medieval brain-fart they just had, they encourage him and reassure him and avoid telling him that it’s really stupid, and presto, the poor dumb priests confidently announce it to a skeptical world.

And best of all, the PR experts then get to manage the blowback. It’s a perfect gig.

A glimpse of a theocratic world

Nope, I’m going to call this story debunked. A commenter has pointed out that Jhelum has several established Christian communities and is not the monolithic Islamic city the story implies, so it looks like this is a complete fabrication by Compass Direct News, a Christian propaganda outfit. The only stories here are that Christians lie to feed their martyr complex, and sometimes I’m fooled.

Jamshed Masih is a police officer in Pakistan who also happens to be a Christian. He transferred to a town dominated by the local Muslim cleric, Maulana Mahfooz Khan. In a story that sounds like the beginning of a Western, Khan warned Masih that Jhelum was his place, and he wasn’t going to stand for any filthy Christian scum livin’ in this here town. Local businesses refused to serve his family, there was a lot of tension…if this were a movie, you’d expect the new sheriff in town to be cleaning up the intolerant boss.

This wasn’t a movie, though, and the real world never seems to resolve itself so neatly. Instead, while Masih was away, Khan accused his 11 year old son of blaspheming against Allah, roused up a mob of good devout Muslims, and murdered Masih’s wife and four young children. The only blasphemy described is that neighbors heard the children singing hymns at breakfast time.

Yes. They were slaughtered because they did not practice Khan’s religion of peace. And because children were singing songs Khan did not like.

Masih has filed a legal complaint. The police administrators have refused to accept it or do anything, because Khan is powerful in the area, and because, after all, the children were blaspheming against Islam.

No human being should ever have to live under a theocracy, the most barbarous and inhuman form of government anyone has ever developed.

God needs more blood

Molly Norris, the cartoonist who launched “Draw Mohammed Day” (and who later withdrew herself from the event, citing her fear of persecution) has just been put on a hit list, calling for Muslims to murder her.

i-3377edf59f0ec899cce2814b94b6dfb7-awlaki.jpeg

The man calling for her death is this Yemeni cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, a pleasant looking fellow who also cheerfully encouraged the Fort Hood massacre. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but behind that smiling face is the mind of a hateful monster.

He’s from the US. He claims to have served as an imam in California, Colorado, and Virginia. And now he’s holed up in Yemen, advocating death for cartoons.

I can’t tell what’s going on here. Did Islam turn him into a psychopath? Or do psychopaths just find a happy home in Islam? Either way, Allah is an abomination that poisons people’s minds. It might reassure me of the good intentions and harmlessness of faith if I saw Muslims rioting in cities around the world, protesting the infamy that people like Awlaki bring down on Islam…but I won’t hold my breath waiting for it.

I just noticed — there’s a poll at that link.

A radical cleric has called for the execution of a U.S. cartoonist after she launched a project called “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” Do you support the cartoonist’s lampoon?

Yes. She was making a statement protected under the First Ammendment. That’s her job. 41%
No. She knew Islam forbids drawing the likeness of Mohammed. This is insulting, not fun. 51%
Not sure. 7%

Disillusion me some more, people. A majority thinks the problem here is with a cartoonist drawing a teacup?

£20,000,000! For what?

That’s some houseguest. The Pope invited himself to visit England, and asked the British government to pay for it — that takes some gall right there — and is now revealing that the bill for his visit will be at least £20 million. They’re dropping all that cash to fête a ringleader for child rapists…it makes no sense. What are people doing over there?

There ought to be a flat declaration that if he wants to visit England, he’s doing so as a private citizen — all costs to be paid by the Catholic church — and that there will also be no protection against being served any legal papers. He’s head of a criminal organization, and that shouldn’t warrant any special privileges.

Mike S. Adams, bad professor

The Supreme Court recently decided that campus student groups do not have to be subsidized by the university if they discriminate — so, for instance, the campus Christian club can’t refuse to admit gays and also collect university money. Perfectly reasonable, to my mind.

It’s driving flitterbrained conservatives mad, though. They can’t discriminate? Injustice! Perhaps one of the craziest is Mike Adams, who has announced his intention to abuse the ruling at UNC Wilmington.

…when I get back to the secular university in August, I plan to round up the students I know who are most hostile to atheism. Then I’m going to get them to help me find atheist-haters willing to join atheist student groups across the South. I plan to use my young fundamentalist Christian warriors to undermine the mission of every group that disagrees with me on the existence of God.

What a coincidence — I’m hoping to restart the UMM Freethinkers group this August, too. I can’t quite imagine bringing together students interested in atheism/agnosticism/secularism and telling them our plan is for them to join Christian groups instead, and become pests and troublemakers. That plan is just bizarre, and a disservice to the honest discussion of the issues…and a disservice to the students. Mike Adams doesn’t care!

That means an invading group can turn a smaller, weaker group into second class citizens on campus. That’s what I intend to do to those groups who do not believe in God.

This could get really interesting. It’s not just the students who’ll be annoyed; there’s this little thing called ‘collegiality’, where we have to work together with our fellow faculty. And those faculty may be advising some of those other groups. I can just imagine what would happen if I tried to turn freethinkers on campus into militant disruptors of other organizations: their faculty advisors would descend on me in fury. I might even suddenly find myself nominated and elected to serve on some of the more tedious committees on campus.

And here’s the kicker:

I do not seek robust debate. I seek power over the godless heathen dissident.

This guy actually works at a university? Madness.

By the way, if any Christians or Muslims want to join the UMM Freethinkers, they’d be welcome. We like debate. It would make the meetings lively.