Does this count as child abuse yet? Some Muslims are distributing children’s DVDs with this wholesome message:

The first video shows an Arab woman playing with her two children before leaving her home with dynamite tucked into her dress.

She is approached by uniformed soldiers and the camera pauses on her thoughtful expression before a large explosion blazes across the screen.

After finding out about the suicide on television, her small daughter finds a stick of dynamite in her mother’s wardrobe and turns to the camera with the subtitles: “My love will not be by words. I will follow my mother’s steps.”

You can inculcate some mighty fine, high quality hate if you start ’em young enough.

Someday, I’m going to have to get John Wilkins to explain to me why we still have universities with theology departments, and haven’t razed them to the ground and sent the few remaining rational people in them off to sociology and anthropology departments where their work might actually have some relevance. It’s terribly uncharitable of me, but after reading this interview with John Haught, a Georgetown University theologian, I’m convinced that the discipline is the domain of vapid hacks stuffed full of antiquated delusions. I also feel bad for the guy since he did testify on the side of reason in the Dover trial. On the other hand, he is one of Richard Dawkins’ fleas, and has a new book on the way complaining about those annoying New Atheists — which is another serious strike against theology. How is it that a book all the inmates in that moribund playroom full of pious god-wallopers despise has become the central focus of their academic careers? I could see it if they were actually addressing the arguments in The God Delusion, but they never seem to do more than squeal the same old arguments in favor of their tired dogmas.

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I have to wonder if Navy Lt. Cmdr. John Thomas Matthew Lee, Chaplain, was considered a man of good character—he just received a two year prison sentence after using his office for years as a base for preying on young Navy men…and he was also HIV-positive. He had his sentence reduced for his willingness to give up all of the names of his sexual partners, for their own good, I presume.

I also wonder if the Navy would be so fierce in their denunciations if he’d been using his rank and reputation to molest young women. There’s also a troubling suggestion that their pursuit of the victim’s names wasn’t entirely virtuous.

By trying to control the story and dampen the coverage, Marine officials delayed informing the public about the case — and Lee’s partners and victims about potential health risks. The officials knew that aim was important: They were willing to reduce the fairness of the sentence to achieve it.

Had the Corps released this public information to the media, it would have bought Lee’s victims more than a month to seek treatment, since the charges relating to his HIV status were preferred Nov. 1. It might not sound like much, but ask the victims whether they would like that time back. More important, ask anyone who’s had sex with the victims since then.

Remember that bizarre video from Pat Robertson that claimed I-35 was a holy highway? One element featured there was a cheerful (ex-?)gay man who claimed to have been “cured” in one of the Purity Sieges the Christians put on.

It turns out that the story wasn’t quite as beautiful as it was portrayed. The fellow was bipolar, was deprived of his medicine, put through a hellish harrowing instead of treatment, and was eventually kicked out of the “gay cure” program as a failure. The poor guy was simply manipulated for propaganda purposes by these Christianist fanatics.

And the outcome is pretty ugly for Christianity. The lesson from this story is that when people set aside their religious beliefs, they can be decent to one another; when they use them to provoke violence, well, they look rather stupid.

Daughters (and sons) have a special property: normal people simply can’t kill them. They drive us crazy, they can break our hearts, but we just can’t do them harm ourselves.

So I really don’t understand how a father can kill his daughter over her clothing choices. I can yell, and I could ground her, and I could deprive her of privileges…but physically hurt her? Impossible.

Oh. It was over religious apparel. That explains everything. Religion is very good at subverting and destroying normal, healthy family values.

Would you care to attend Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church for a morning? Philip Bloom has a short documentary in which he used a hidden camera in the Phelps compound. It’s as you might expect: raging howls of a sermon, condemnations and hatred, people hoping that millions of others die and go to hell. Phelps has 13 children (11 of whom are lawyers!) and 54 grandchildren, and looking around the pews there can’t be many more attendees than that.

The end is particularly disturbing when two of Phelps’ teenaged granddaughters come up to regurgitate the very same hate speech at the reporter. It’s also kind of creepy because they look so alike, and like Shirley Phelps Roper, and Fred Phelps … just how inbred are these people?

I’m afraid, though, that there’s a little interlude in the middle with a liberal minister in Topeka, and she’s saying with such certainty the usual platitudes about how god is love and he wouldn’t countenance Phelps’ activities, etc., and I found that just as offensive as Phelps’ screeching about god’s nature and desires. They’re both ignorant, and they’re both saying what they think their congregation wants to hear.

Remember that awful, nonsensical “Letter from Hell” on GodTube? It was a particularly contemptible example of the evangelical impulse — the message was that not only will you suffer horribly in hell if you are naughty, but all your friends will, too…and it’ll be all your fault.

Would you believe a schoolteacher showed that video in a public school?

It’s a patently evangelical video for an especially disgusting version of the Christian cult, it plainly says that its purpose is to “help teens share Christ with their friends,” it was downloaded from Godtube, and it was shown in a class with a Jewish student (the only Jewish family in all of North Dakota^*).

The teacher’s excuse? It was intended to show the dangers of drunk driving.

Yeah, right. The reason you shouldn’t drink and drive is that you might end up practicing your penmanship in hell. Isn’t it enough to say that you might end up dead or injured, or you might kill or injure someone else?

Besides, isn’t threatening kids in North Dakota with hell kind of like promising them an upgrade?^**

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^*I probably exaggerate.

^**I kid, I kid.