Now their insane denial of the legitimacy of modern psychiatry leads to an insane woman butchering her family. It’s appalling: the parents were scientologists who refused to give anti-psychotic drugs to their daughter, and the end result is that they and another daughter are slaughtered.
This is where delusional, irrational, wishful thinking leads you — to a rejection of reality that has the potential to crash in on you in lethal ways.
A high school student loans a friend, another high school student, his copy of The God Delusion. Two things happen: the friend’s father loses his cool and complains to their school, and a school administrator suggests that this was an establishment clause violation. And this was at a school that allowed the Gideons to distribute bibles in the parking lot!
At least the lunatic father finally returned the book.
It’s ironic. I get accused of being some kind of deranged militant atheist, yet when my kids got handed tracts and evangelical comic books and were asked to attend church and sunday school with their friends (and all of those were reasonably common events), I just gave ’em the thumbs up, read the comics myself (they were uniformly terrible), and shooed ’em out the door on Sunday morning. Yet scrubbing the information their kids are allowed to see is common practice among the religious — it’s the primary reason for Christian home schooling, for instance.
I’ve always figured I was just boosting their intellectual immune system.
(via the Friendly Atheist)
I guess y’all are having a drought, and your farmers are worried. I sympathize, and I do hope you get some good healthy summer storms soon. But, well, your governor is a dufus.
With the state’s weather forecasters not delivering much-needed rain, Gov. Bob Riley on Thursday turned to a higher power. The governor issued a proclamation calling for a week of prayer for rain, beginning Saturday.
Riley encouraged Alabamians to pray “individually and in their houses of worship.”
“Throughout our history, Alabamians have turned in prayer to God to humbly ask for his blessings and to hold us steady during times of difficulty,” Riley said. “This drought is without question a time of great difficulty.”
Shhh. I’m going to tell you two secrets.
One: prayer doesn’t work. Never does. Besides, if it’s Georgia putting a curse on you, they outvote you in God’s eyes.
Two: when I lived in Eugene, we used to make trips to Bend, Oregon to vacation — they always advertise about how they only get like 8 days of rain a year. It always rained when we visited. Therefore, if you really want it to rain, you ought to fly me in and parade me around the state. I have big rain ju-ju.
I’m sure we can come up with lots of incantations and rituals that various cultures have invented to conjure rain. You should try them all. It can’t hurt, after all.
What an attractively symmetrical graph:
People who don’t go to church mostly disagree with GW Bush; people who do go to church regularly mostly agree with GW Bush. Unfortunately, these results are from a poll taken in 2005, so it may have lost some of that symmetry since—I certainly hope it has, and that all of the bars in “agree for the most part” category have since gotten smaller.
Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is worried. He’s afraid we’re going to put a human brain in a rodent’s head. No, really — it’s not just a joke in a cartoon. He seriously wants to suppress research in transgenic and chimeric animals “before a mouse really does come up and ask for a cookie.” Now, seriously, his worry isn’t that mice will be smarter than he is and eat all his cookies. No, he has better reasons.
The scariest part of this research is directed at work done in hope of curing or treating diseases of the human brain.
They might cure debilitating neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s or cerebral palsy or schizophrenia! Those horrible, horrible scientists—how dare they cure our god-given afflictions. We deserve them!
A “visionary” is recommending a new way of seeing “visions” of the Virgin Mary: stare directly into the sun. It works! Sort of.
Zackey reportedly advised a Gauteng woman, Amal Nassif (37), earlier to look at the sun, and if she had faith, the Virgin Mary would appear.
Nassif stared at the sun for about a minute and lost her sight.
“I can’t seen anything. There is a large dark blind spot,” she was quoted as saying.
I have a “vision,” too — if you hit yourself in the head with a hammer really, really hard, you’ll see Jesus! That makes about as much sense as Zackey’s. Who, by the way, is reported as being “happy”, and is “inundated with people seeking prayer and healing.”
Here’s your course of action. First, tune up your brain with Encephalon #25. Feeling smart now?
Next, browse The Carnival of the Godless #69. Now you’re smart and aggressively, skeptically godless. Sharp as a knife.
Now you’re ready to read Revere’s Sunday Sermonette. You will be entertained. It’s an account of a Georgia pastor wrestling with theodicy, and he refreshingly concludes that a) yes, god is screwing with you and making you suffer, and b) his explanation is that god is making sure you don’t forget him. God is a petty tyrant who torments you to remind you that he exists.
You should be feeling pretty cocky at this point. These theological arguments are so silly and shallow and superficial, and you can just slice right through them.
Unfortunately, Greg Laden is going to slime you with a loogey gun next. Watching Michele Bachmann talk about god is agonizing—god was apparently “focused like a laser beam” on her congressional race; the omnipotent omniscient ruler of the entire universe thought a political contest in a small Minneapolis suburb was the most important event in the whole cosmos, and was personally wielding his vast power to get a babbling boob into office.
Hah. What good does all your brain power and reason and logic do against that, I ask you? If there were a god, Michele Bachmann would be evidence that he is evil and he is screwing with us.
What is wrong with these people?
Be sure to catch the cute little toddler’s solo at the end. Tell me, is this child abuse yet?
Why, this must be the smartest dog in the universe.
Her husband decided to ask their 4-year-old dog another question, the square root of 25. Micah tapped his paw five times.
To prove this wasn’t a fluke, the couple and a friend tossed out more math than teachers during exam time. Micah consistently pawed the correct answers, appearing to solve such problems as square root division, finding the numerators and denominators of fractions, multiplying and dividing, even basic algebra.
“He can calculate problems given in English, Spanish, French and German,” Cindy Tuten said.
Never underestimate the power of small groups of crazy people. All it takes is motivation, small-mindedness, and persistence, and any group can promote ignorance and limit people’s choices.
