Guess whose fault it is that Trump is running for president, and has some popular support? It’s not the mobs of bigoted known-nothings who cheer his every simplistic solutions. It’s not the right-wingers who have been feasting on a steady diet of Fox News. It’s not the beady-eyed monomaniacal fanatics who love their guns and god.
Nope. It’s all the fault of the leftists who oppose every single thing Trump stands for.
Just evangelical Christians, which is even worse.
Jim Bakker has taken his apocalyptic Christian ministry to the next logical step. Since the world is going to end soon, with years and years of tribulation, his flock is going to need to eat, and with no more senior discounts at the Sizzler he’s going to have to provide for them. So after stirring up fear of doom for a while, he now tells his audience to hoard gold and silver and buy great big buckets of food to store away for Armageddon. Nice racket.
One little problem: somebody actually tasted the food in buckets. Their sole virtue is that they’re so loaded with preservatives that they should last for 20 years.
They taste, he says, like, “paper-mache,” “a bathroom at a bar at the end of the night in a college town,” and, simply, “one of the worst things I’ve ever eaten in my life.”
Religion poisons everything. Including, literally, food.
She knows what’s up.
On November 27, a mass shooting left three dead and nine wounded at a Planned Parenthood clinic just miles from the headquarters of the Religious Right flagship, Focus on the Family. Was the shooting exactly what conservative Christian presidential candidates and members of congress wanted? Maybe, maybe not. But it is what they asked for. Republican members of the Religious Right incited violence as predictably as if they had issued a call for Christian abortion foes to take up arms. Inciting violence this way is called stochastic terrorism:
“Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. In short, remote-control murder by lone wolf.”
In an incident of stochastic terrorism, the person who pulls the trigger gets the blame. He—I use the male pronoun deliberately because the triggerman is almost always male—may go to jail or even be killed during his act of violence. Meanwhile, the person or persons who have triggered the triggerman, in other words, the actual stochastic terrorists, often go free, protected by plausible deniability.
She’s also not afraid to name names.
We can be confident that communications teams for Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and others are scrambling at this very moment to figure out the nuances of plausible deniability—weighing how best to distance themselves from the violence that killed a police officer and two others without making their protestations of surprised dismay sound as hollow as they actually are—without actually denouncing the disgust and dehumanization of women who have abortions and those who provide them.
But of course they’re going to get away with it. They’ve got obedient masses who were trained in the churches to obey authorities.
Let’s look on the bright side of this infuriating story.
Khalil, 29 and Ayyad, 28, moved to Philadelphia from Palestine 15 years ago. Khalil now owns the Feltonville pizza shop — Pizza Point — that gave him his first job. The friends were in Chicago visiting each other’s families and met back at the airport Wednesday night to take the same flight home. The gate agent told them apologetically they wouldn’t be allowed to board because a passenger was afraid to fly with them after overhearing the men speaking Arabic.
So they called the police, and argued, and finally, after a delay, were allowed to board the plane. It’s totally unjust that someone can just whine about a fellow passenger’s religion or language and get them kicked off.
But…you know, last time I was on a flight, there was a Catholic priest in all the sombre regalia boarding the plane with me.
You can see where this is going.
Can I go to the gate agent and claim that I am afraid to fly with a member of a child-raping cult that worships death? Because that is just as reasonable as claiming I’m afraid that a couple of pizza guys were a danger because they didn’t speak English to each other. But hey, if airlines are going to bend over so much to avoid defying the bigotry of their passengers, we could start acting as stupid as those fools and be really annoying.
Except, unfortunately, that I have no interest in competing in the idiocy race with bigots, and generally when I’m boarding a plane I just want to get the process over with and get to my destination.
Also, I doubt that they would care what an atheist fears, anyway.
She has declared the current Starbucks holiday cup ‘controversy’ stupid.
Do not buy in to the media hype surrounding this story!! It is just another attempt by the LEFT to make Christians look stupid.
She still gets some things wrong. All of us on the “LEFT” are shocked and bemused by the fact that anyone on the “RIGHT” thinks this is a matter of any significance at all…but the original instigator, people like Joshua Feuerstein, are most definitely not part of any left-wing conspiracy.
I am also amused by one other little fact. She thinks the controversy is stupid, but…
But even Palin said that she had chosen to buy her coffee at the local Mocha Moose instead of patronizing Starbucks.
But then maybe that’s entirely because Starbucks coffee is terrible.
You can read this new paper in Current Biology titled The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World and see for yourself — religiosity is not a good thing for fostering generosity, it seems. The authors are a truly international group who tested children from Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey, USA, and South Africa with a set of games, and got a set of results that showed a statistically significant difference in the degree of altruism for different religions, or lack thereof. Here’s how the results look:
Christians are adamant that they are persecuted, despite being a majority in this country and despite controlling all of politics — not only is it almost impossible to get elected to high office unless you’re Christian, but one of the most common complaints about politicians people don’t like is that they are non-Christian, as if that’s enough reason to impeach. Look at Obama, who’s always getting called a Muslim. He’s clearly not, by all that he says and does, and besides, it shouldn’t matter if he were a Muslim or a Satanist.
As a vocal and activist atheist, I’m in a peculiar position. I ought to be in a position to hammer young minds with godless propaganda, but I don’t — I’m actually very conscientious about avoiding making students think about the anti-scientific nature of religion in the classroom, because we’ve got more than enough topics to cover. Yet over and over again, I learn that Christian educators have no such compunction, and are happily engaged in indoctrinating their students, while at the same time, whining that they get no respect and are oppressed by godless scientists.
Zack Kopplin interviewed students in Louisiana. It’s all preachin’ and bible-thumpin’.
Todd Starnes, Fox News wingnut, must really love insects, because he’s begging his god to send more.
When the public schools tell students that our Founding Fathers were a bunch of terrorists: Send the hornets, Lord! Clear the field! When a teacher tells a little boy he can’t pray over his meal: Send the hornets, Lord! Clear that field! When the Pentagon tells them to take down a cross on a Christian chapel: Send those hornets! Clear the field! When the Supreme Court says they know better than God: Send the hornets, Lord! Clear the field! And, when the president says that America is no longer just a Christian nation: Don’t send the hornets, Lord. Send the mosquitoes and the gnats, and the bumblebees and the lightning bugs and the cicadas! Send every critter you got, Lord! Clear the field!
From that last post, I wanted to single out one of the criticisms Answers in Genesis has of other people’s renderings of the book of Genesis.
10. Ark looks like a bathtub with happy animals sticking out of it
That’s an odd complaint. So children’s books are all bad because they have cartoonish simplifications of the old myth? This collection of medieval and more recent art showing the Ark is all wrong?
