In the annals of god-soaked sports hype…

Here’s an article that deserves a prize. It’s wall-to-wall praise-Jebus babble, giving the Lord of the Universe credit for getting the Colorado Rockies baseball team into the World Series—have a puke bucket handy if you actually try to read the whole thing.

“You look at some of the moves we made and didn’t make,” general manager Dan O’Dowd said in the only interview he has given on the subject, long before the Rockies’ remarkable ascension over the past few weeks. “You look at some of the games we’re winning. Those aren’t just a coincidence. God has definitely had a hand in this.”

And that’s just one small piece of the story. The rest is trying to make a long argument that all of the improbabilities mean that the divine must have had a hand in elevating a local sports team to national recognition. It’s amazing. You would think a God would have slightly different priorities.

But then, I suspect I know the truth. The piety of the team and the fans don’t matter in the slightest. God is doing it to spite Andy.

No purposes but those we create for ourselves

Those sneaky rascals at the Templeton Foundation have asked one of those ridiculous questions that gets some otherwise rational people stumbling over themselves to give an inoffensive answer: does the universe have a purpose? Of course, the irrational people have no trouble piping up with a happy “Yes!”, which should clue everyone in, as Larry notes, that it’s a gimmick question designed to provoke a range of waffly answers … and waffles, especially the tepid, limp kind, are the stock-in-trade of the Templeton House of Waffles.

I’d say “no, there is no evidence of universal purpose and no reason to assume one,” and be done with it. Except, perhaps, to ask those who say “yes” to specify exactly what that purpose is, and how they know it.

Near as I can tell, the primary purposes of the universe as discerned from the casual expressions of religion’s proponents are 1) to bias victory in local football games, and 2) to regulate the appropriate orifices into which certain people are allowed to place their penises. How the creation of Betelgeuse, the concentration of planetary material in our solar system in one body which we can’t reach and which is uninhabitable to us, and the ubiquity and success of bacteria all play into these purposes is unknown to me … it must be one of God’s mysteries.

Time to skew another internet poll

Or in this case, perhaps, unskew one. Take a look at this poll that asks, Does Islam Oppress or Liberate Women? The leading answer so far is “Islam is generally liberating to women, freeing them from sexual pressures that exist elsewhere. “

Yeah, if by “liberating” you mean “compelling them to wear a bag over their head, not allowing them to drive or hold various public positions, and in some cases, gouging out chunks of their genitalia with a piece of broken glass.”

Morris Area High Schools … for Christ

Speaking of bad teaching and schools that screw up under community pressure, it looks like we have an ugly story here in Morris. Last week, the student at the Morris Area High School were released from classes (you know, those sessions where they are supposed to learn something) to listen to some motivational speaker babbling about healthy lifestyles and abstinence, and apparently telling them that Madonna was a lesbian, among other tidbits. I’ve only heard third-hand about the event itself — Skatje‘s still in touch with friends at the high school, but she didn’t actually attend herself — but now there’s an article in the local paper on it.

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More priests behaving badly

That conservative Christian who offed himself in an autoerotic embarrassment? That’s simply sad, and reflects poorly on a repressive culture. This story, of a Catholic priest who collaborated in kidnappings and torture, is just plain evil, and is something completely different.

Christian Von Wernich, 69, was chaplain to the Buenos Aires police force. He used this position to obtain confessions from prisoners, which he then passed on to police who tortured them at secret detention centers.

Von Wernich was convicted of complicity in seven murders, 31 cases of torture and 42 abductions in the Buenos Aires region; a mere smattering of the estimated 30,000 disappearances during the military junta’s countrywide purge of leftists.

And before everyone starts suspecting I think all religious people are repressed sexual obsessives or mass murderers, I’ll clarify: I don’t think these people are messed up because of religion. I think they’d be messed up if they were atheists, too. But what we can clearly see is that religion doesn’t help, and may in some cases make a problem worse. Religion, far from being a force for morality in the world, is a mask that promotes the appearance of normality while allow some truly wretched ideas to fester beneath.

The mask is crumbling, though, and at least more young people are seeing through the illusion.

New Christian fascism and hate

We’re seeing an ugly form of intolerance creeping into the western states, carried with slavic evangelicals who hate homosexuals.

A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls. In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.

Vlad Kusakin, the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento and the publisher of a Russian-language newspaper in Seattle, told The Seattle Times in January that God has “made an injection” of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities. “In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin,” Kusakin said.

That’s a mild example of their rhetoric. Under the cloak of their odious religious beliefs, these holy thugs are on a hate-crusade against gays, and they’ve already killed at least one person, Satender Singh, for the ‘crime’ of not being heterosexual enough.

The Box Turtle Bulletin and Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion have more on these rather nasty immigrants … and their American enablers.

Play whack-a-mole with Lee Siegel

You have to read this essay to believe it: Militant atheists are wrong. It’s a collection of what I call indignant pieties — “how dare atheists challenge my precious faith!” — and it’s also distilled, concentrated, essence of stupid, painful to read and even more agonizing to have to waste time arguing against. But then, it’s by Lee Siegel. Lee Siegel. There’s a man who has a lot of courage, exposing himself on the internet again. Siegel is the amazing hypocrite who denounced the ethics of the blogosphere, and then cobbled up a sock puppet ( remember “Sprezzatura”?) who went trolling around the blogosphere singing the praises of Lee Siegel. Fortunately, I don’t have to suffer over his nonsense too much — Melissa takes a bullet for the rest of us, stuffs Siegel’s brain in the toilet bowl, and flushes.

I do want to touch on one bizarre claim he makes while swirling down the drain, though.

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Demons, angels…and now saints

A certain evil old (and now deceased) affliction on the world is being considered for canonization, and they’re tallying up miracles, an absurd activity in itself. One of the “miracles” they’re weighing is that of a man whose kidney stone cleared up after visiting a children’s home founded by Mother Teresa…an awfully tenuous connection, if you ask me, and a rather trivial event. Time magazine starts to agree:

At first glance the elimination of a mineral deposit may seem too insignificant to merit sainthood.

But then of course they go on to make excuses for it. They should have stopped there.

It is insignificant. The connection is thin. The whole premise of sainthood is supernatural silliness. It’s just one big charade.

Consider St. Antonio de Sant’Anna Galvao, whom Pope Benedict XVI canonized last December. Galvao, who died in 1822 (he was on the slow track) was a Franciscan monk in Sao Paolo who distributed “pills” that were actually folded bits of rice paper bearing the prayer: “After birth, the Virgin remained intact. Mother of God, intercede on our behalf.” Believers swallowed them for various ailments. After Galvao’s death nuns in his monastery took up the pill production. According to England’s Daily Telegraph, as his cause for sainthood began picking up steam, they were up to 10,000 pills a day. The Telegraph reported that the local hierarchy opposed the practice, and a senior archbishop commented that it “foster[s] suspicion.” However, the Vatican was apparently satisfied.

Laugh long and hard at the Catholic church. They have a process for posthumously rewarding charlatans for successful chicanery.

Scratch a rich Christian, watch them ooze corruption

Hoo boy. It’s scandal time in Evangelica again. Richard Roberts, son of the infamous Oral, and his wife Lindsay, seem to have been skimming the cream off their university budget (and in her case, perhaps, off young male students).

Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors’ expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter’s senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.

She is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as “underage males.”

Roberts’ defense? God is now giving him legal advice.

In his weekly chapel address today, Mr. Roberts said God had spoken to him this morning and advised him to respond to the lawsuit. “Here’s what he told me to say to you,” Mr. Roberts told the students and professors gathered at the service, according to the Associated Press. “‘We live in a litigious society. Anyone can get mad and file a lawsuit against another person whether they have a legitimate case or not.’

“‘This lawsuit … is not about wrongful termination,’” Mr. Roberts said God added. “‘It is about intimidation, blackmail, and extortion,’” he said, according to the wire service.

I don’t know, I’m a little disappointed. The Great Lord of All the Universe has been awfully quiet for a long, long time, and now he breaks his silence to tell the world that there is an excess of lawsuits, and defend a sybaritic pair of spoiled, overprivileged con artists? Doesn’t he have more important things to do? How come he never gives us any useful insights?