The apologists will now explain to us that these people don’t actually exist

The wingnuts are still outraged that there is a Muslim in congress and that a Hindu delivered an opening prayer (which was pretty dang lame, anyway). Now look at this silly little man (R-Idaho) ranting about the death of America:

Last month, the U.S. Senate was opened for the first time ever with a Hindu prayer. Although the event generated little outrage on Capitol Hill, Representative Bill Sali (R-Idaho) is one member of Congress who believes the prayer should have never been allowed.

“We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes — and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers,” asserts Sali.

Sali says America was built on Christian principles that were derived from scripture. He also says the only way the United States has been allowed to exist in a world that is so hostile to Christian principles is through “the protective hand of God.”

“You know, the Lord can cause the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike,” says the Idaho Republican.

According to Congressman Sali, the only way the U.S. can continue to survive is under that protective hand of God. He states when a Hindu prayer is offered, “that’s a different god” and that it “creates problems for the longevity of this country.”

We’ve been having a little discussion in the comments here about the insensibility of satire and parody in this age of Christian lunacy. Take a look at the comments on that article — they are almost all effusive in their praise for Sali and are howling about how America must be ruled by the One True God™. These recent parodies of various Republican presidential candidates are amusing, but there’s a reality out there that’s far crazier and far scarier.

But these people don’t exist, I have often been told. The religious are thoughtful, progressive, inoffensive types.

Those poor damned kids

Pity the children at Castle Hills First Baptist School. It is a truly god-soaked institution, where everything is distorted to fit a fundagelical vision. I’ve heard of inserting God into biology, obviously, but the description of godly calculus has got to be seen to be believed. And history is apparently the study of the nature of god as revealed by social studies, while Jesus’ preferred economic model is capitalism.

It’s in Texas, of course.

I wonder if it is the perfect model of what McLeroy wants done with the public school system?

Do you want people who respect Stephen Baldwin to run your army?

I mentioned the growing entanglement of fundamentalist religion in the military the other day, and here’s another example: proselytization in the military by evangelical freaks like Stephen Baldwin.

Baldwin became a right-wing, born-again Christian after the 9/11 attacks, and now is the star of Operation Straight Up (OSU), an evangelical entertainment troupe that actively proselytizes among
active-duty members of the US military. As an official
arm of the Defense Department’s America Supports You program, OSU plans to mail copies of the controversial apocalyptic video game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces to soldiers serving in Iraq. OSU is also scheduled to embark on a “Military Crusade in Iraq” in the near future.

Hang on there … maybe we shouldn’t worry too much. If the evangelical arsenal consists of the dumbest of the Baldwin brothers and an exceptionally lame video game, all it’s going to succeed in doing is recruiting the dregs and dullards…

…who will then be lofted into positions of leadership in the most powerful military force in the world.

Hmmm. Maybe we should be concerned.

I get email

Here’s an odd correlation for you: whenever I take a swipe at the foolishness of Scott Adams, I get a major uptick in the usual trickle of Christian email. I don’t quite see Adams as a friend to Christianity, although he does seem to foster the kind of shallow thinking on which religiosity thrives. Anyway, for your delectation, I’ve put a couple of samples below.

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What Would Jesus Do … with a cruise missile?

It’s frightening to see religion poisoning our military, but it’s happening. A group of generals is facing disciplinary action for promoting an evangelical religious organization, and they admit to being oblivious to the problem of a general declaring that his “first priority is his faith in god”, or in supporting a fanatical Christian group that wants to target foreign diplomats, ambassadors, and other representatives for conversion to Christianity. These fellows lent the dignity and responsibility of their positions to a weird cult, and now they defend themselves with this particularly chilling argument:

Brooks told investigators he believed he did not violate any rules. Due to Christian Embassy’s long tenure of working with Pentagon employees, Brooks said he saw the group “as a sanctioned or endorsed activity.”

Catton’s response was similar. Christian Embassy had become a “quasi-federal entity,” he told investigators, and he believed he was taking part in a program approved by the Defense Department.

So because they blindly assumed that Christian proselytization was a normal activity for high-level military leaders, they went ahead and contributed to a movie that portrays our government as a hotbed of Christian crazies … which is true, unfortunately, but we don’t need to pretend that that is a good thing.

You can watch the whole movie — it’s an embarrassingly treacly pile of crap in which politicians and soldiers profess their reliance on morning bible study and advice from the Lord to do their jobs. For instance, it’s got representative Gresham Barrett of South Carolina piously declaiming the moral guidance he’s been given, saying “You have to think about what’s right, what’s right for the country” while the video shows a picture of him smilingly shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld. It’s got Pentagon chaplain Ralph Benson providing his solution to the “war on terror”: “What more do we need than Christian people leading us?” Christian Embassy, by the way, seems to be affiliated with Bill Bright and the Campus Crusade for Christ — that’s all we need is crusaders taking over the military.

These displays of piety from our leaders always make me want to sit them down and pin them down on precisely how Jesus is advising them. They seem bereft of any sense of ethics at all, which is making Jesus look like a right clueless bastard whose sole interest is in promoting the careers of self-serving maggots like Tom Delay.

They let anybody onto the faculty at Oxford nowadays

A few readers sent me a link to this interview with Alister McGrath; most thought it was worth a laugh, but one actually seemed to think I’d be devastated. I’m afraid the majority were correct: everything I’ve read by McGrath suggests that here is a man whose thoughts have been arrested by a temporal lobe seizure that he has mistaken for a lightning bolt from god. He’d probably be flattered to be compared to C.S. Lewis, but I see some similarities in the shallowness of their thinking that they believe they’ve deepened by tapping into theological tradition, but I’m sorry — my bathroom tap could drip for millennia, but it’s a nuisance, not Niagara.

It also doesn’t help that his argument is basically one of dogma and contradiction.

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Shades of Haryun Yahya!

The Turkish creationist sunk a whole lot of money sending an elaborate creationist book to thousands of biologists. I’m sure he felt he was doing us a favor in sending us the light, but most of the recipients were feeling something less pleasant — it’s like receiving a gilded dead rat in the mail. Now the conservative Christians are going to get in the act, and in a low-rent version of the game are going to send a few hundred thousand cheap bibles to newspaper subscribers.

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Desecration: it’s a fun hobby!

i-b09551f6b7f071fa14c9437188995f78-quran.jpg

I am appalled. A man in New York was arrested for throwing a copy of the Quran in a public toilet. He deserved arrest—everyone knows it is vandalism and criminal mischief to clog a public toilet with debris.

Oh, hang on — the guy was arrested for a hate crime? Are toilets now on the list of victims targeted by fringe fanatics? What’s their slogan: “Bring Back the Open Trench!”? It is a shame to see innocent and useful toilets persecuted in this ghastly way …

Wait, never mind. He was arrested for being mean to Muslims, which also makes no sense. He destroyed a book and clogged a toilet. If some local nut started setting fire to copies of The God Delusion, I wouldn’t feel personally victimized — let her burn all the copies she can buy, it’s just more money in Richard Dawkins’ pocket. (If she started stuffing copies into the toilets, though, then I might feel oppressed. When you gotta go, you gotta go.)

You know, there is a tradition around here, one that I’ve practiced for a few years: overwrought sanctimony must be met with disrespectful insolence. So I’m thinking of picking up a cheap copy of the Qu’ran. And I’m thinking … what to do, what to do. It will, of course, be something in the privacy of my home, with my very own copy — none of this public vandalism and veiled threats to people who believe. It will just be a demonstration of my right to treat my property as it deserves and of my opinion of this silly book.

So here are a few ideas. Maybe you can think of some more.

  • I could simply urinate on it, but that’s old hat.

  • If I had a puppy, I could use the pages for paper training. But I do not have a puppy and I’m not going to get one for this horrible reason.

  • The traditional approach: keep it near the fireplace, and use the pages for kindling. Of course, there’s no way I’m going to start a fire in the fireplace in August in Minnesota, so that’s going to have to wait a while.

  • I could doodle cartoons in the margins and make my own crudely illustrated (I have no talent) version of the Qu’ran. Then I could put it on ebay and make a profit.

  • Here’s an artsy option: I could make a new cover and a bookmark for it … out of bacon.

That last one sounds fun, and I could also put up photos on the blog (there’s also a tradition there) but perhaps some of you can come up with a better suggestion.

(via Deep Thoughts)