Prager persuades? Really?

GilDodgen, one of the lead IDiots at Uncommon Descent, recently posted about how he used to be an atheist and was then converted to Christianity — sound familiar? I think atheists must really be underrepresented in the census, because apparently every Christian larva must go through a multi-year developmental stage of intense atheism, by their account. Anyway, he talks about what persuaded him that there is a god, and it was…Dennis Prager. Seriously? I’ve heard Prager, I’ve read his articles, he’s a simpering godbot, and I can’t imagine anyone who attaches the slightest importance to evidence based reasoning being persuaded by that guy.

Two things: first, here’s one of the videos by Prager that Dodgen claims converted him. It’s titled “The most important verse in the Bible” — yeah, that sounds like something that would suck an atheist right in.

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Archaic religion + modern technology → horror in Bolivia

We think of Mennonites as an extremely conservative Christian sect that is cautious about adopting modern technology. But apparently, with the right incentive, they can innovate, as a group of Bolivian Mennonites demonstrate.

Wall is among 130 women and girls of the Mennonite colony in Manitoba Colony, who claim that from 2005 to ’09, the same cloudy horror visited them. They’re the victims of what is allegedly one of the ugliest sex scandals in the history of the Mennonites, a pacifist Christian Anabaptist denomination founded in Europe in the 1500s, if not Bolivia and South America. In a criminal trial now under way in nearby Santa Cruz, Peter Weiber, 48, a Mennonite veterinarian, is accused of transforming a chemical meant to anesthetize cows into a spray to be used on humans. For four years, Weiber and eight other Mennonite men allegedly sprayed the chemical through bedroom windows in Manitoba at night, sedating entire families and raping the females.

Charming fellows. Old-timey farmers. Quaint horse-drawn buggies. Insular, inbred, arrogant patriarchal monsters.

The accused didn’t just commit horrible acts, but don’t seem to feel guilt or remorse.

The men range in ages from 20 to 48. Four of them, including Weiber, are married. But they don’t seem to take the case too seriously: they often joke with guards or fall asleep during trial proceedings, and during one victim’s testimony the judge had to reprimand them for laughing and making faces. That may be one reason victims rarely go to the courthouse. “My heart was racing and my head hurt,” Susana Banman, 55, tells TIME about her one day at the trial.

Suddenly, I don’t find myself as distressed at the thought of the imminent potential extinction of humanity by ecological disaster as I once was. So that’s a bit of good news.

(via Jen)

Mortification of mind and flesh

This is the story of Lydia Schatz, a 7 year old girl in a good Christian home, tortured and beaten to death in the name of God.

Her parents were stupid people, following the parenting advice of a pair of demented fuckwits, Mike and Debi Pearl. The Pearls are popular and prospering because they have a ministry and a collection of books that appeal to a popular strain of fundamentalist Christian thought: the need to control. They see the family as a reflection of their imaginary god, patriarchal, ruled, dominated, and advocate a policy of discipline that echoes what they think their god desires.

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Boycott Sugarland

An accident at a fair in Indiana has killed five people. But the big news is that God saved a couple of country western singers from the duo Sugarland from risk!

Whatever it was, members of Sugarland can thank stage manager Hellen Rollens for saving their lives by making a spur-of-the-moment decision to hold a prayer circle just before the stage collapsed last Saturday at the Indiana State Fair.

Looks like God was listening. Here’s what happened.

Sugarland’s manager, Gail Gellman, credited Rollens with keeping the country pop duo from walking down the ramp at the last second, just as a 70 mph gust of wind from an approaching storm caused the stage to topple over onto the crowd, killing five fans and injuring dozens of others.

“Everybody was standing in a prayer circle getting ready to go onstage, and [as Rollens] was walking down the ramp, the stage fell. So her decision to hold them for literally a minute saved every band member and crew’s life,” Gellman told the Associated Press.

Actually, don’t you suspect that this Rollens character frequently asks the band to waste time in prayer circles, so this was nothing exceptional? Wouldn’t it have been more impressive if God had spoken in warning to Hellen Rollens, so that she’d run out to warn everyone else and tell them to get away from danger, so that 5 people wouldn’t be dead?

Since this God is clearly an evil bastard who cares nothing for human life, and since the members of Sugarland must be agents of an evil, monstrous being who casually swats down their fans, I hope you’ll all join me in boycotting the insensitive wicked minions of this cruel god. Boycott Sugarland!*

*This is admittedly no sacrifice on my part since I’ve never heard of these dull-witted wankers before, and just the phrase “country pop duo” sends me fleeing.

Tough love thuggery under Jesus’ loving hands

New Bethany. New Beginnings. Rebekah Home for Girls. Hephzibah House. Second Chance Ranch. Rachel Academy. Circle of Hope Girls Ranch. These are all places that claim to offer succor to parents of ‘troubled teens’, safe houses where they can send their kids for discipline and loving assistance to overcome whatever has made them rowdy or morose or obstinate or disobedient, all those symptoms of independence, and turn them into cheerful, cooperative, socialized citizens of community conventionality. They all rely heavily on the appeal of Christianity, and their names resonate with biblical themes…when hearing invocations of Jesus to draw children out to isolated camps ought instead to fill everyone with the same sense of dread that hearing the Jaws theme music ought to do.

Predictably, these fly-by-night camps run by Jesus freaks all turn out to be hellholes.

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Tiresome and ill-mannered Muslims

It’s like every time I go to Europe, it’s the same two or three Muslims waiting to greet me. There they were in Dublin, Hamza Tzortzis and his crew, and now I come to Oslo, and there they are, the same Muslims parked outside the Humanist Congress (Google translation).

Islam Net believes Congress is based on “the erroneous assumption that humanism is the way forward for humanity.” Islam Net and its affiliates are not surprisingly more faith in Islam as the way forward.

– Islam is a world view that is not only sensible, but the basis for our values ​​and morals, said the press release.

That’s all nonsense, of course: Islam is a primitive religion with a violent history, and like all those Abrahamic faiths, is all about praising a non-existent patriarchal deity. Islam is the past, atheism and humanism are the future. And if Islam is the basis for our morality, why is the Islamic world such a hellhole of barbarity and opression? (I’d also flip that around and ask, if Christianity is such a moral and righteous faith, why are American Christians so fervent about making the rubble bounce in their bombings of Islamic countries?)

I have no problem with the Muslims putting up their information booth outside the congress. However, what really annoyed me about them was that they were quite dedicated in intruding on the discussion on twitter, using the congress hashtag #humanist2011 freely while not actually attending the congress. We were getting constant exhortations to come out and visit their booth, and they were positively manic in raving about some survivor of the Utoya killings who was a convert to Islam, which was widely considered to be extremely tasteless and inappropriate.

They also got rather frantic when the twitter conversation was about Taslima Nasreen’s talk — you want to annoy an Islamist? Just let a Muslim woman speak. I looked into a few of the angry Islamist tweets: new accounts with almost no history, created just to spam the conference. Bad show, very bad show. They made no new friends with their behavior.

Exercises in obfuscation

As a follow-up to his video of 100 atheists, Jonathan Pararajasingham has collected 20 believing academics explaining their position. Your brain will hurt.

Jerry Coyne has posted brief summaries of all 20, but you’ve got to listen to it all. The point isn’t their answers, which are all non-answers and babbling, but the stark raving incoherence and inconsistency of their attempts to explain themselves.

But why do you believe in Gawd?

This word “god” needs some serious redefining. I keep running into these intentionally obscurantist blitherings about “god” when the definition is clearly bouncing back and forth between multiple meanings. There are at least two categories of gods. Let’s give them different names so we stop confusing them.

  1. Gods as working deities or GAWD. GAWD is an interventionist; it may have created the universe, it has power in the real world, it has a personal interest in human beings and planet Earth. GAWD can answer personal requests, GAWD can carry out miracles, GAWD must be propitiated by thoughts and rituals lest GAWD become wrathful…which is a bad thing that can have dire results in the real world. GAWD is what most religions are about, it’s what most people worship. GAWD is usually portrayed as an omnipotent, omniscient being who is greater than and beyond the universe, but he keeps a hand in and dabbles with virgins and foreskins and sends the occasional tornado and earthquake.

  2. Gods who avoid reality, or GWAR. GWAR is an abstraction, an impersonal and remote being who exists completely outside space and time, who doesn’t actually interact with our world; alternatively, GWAR is simply the state of existence that permeates the entire universe. GWAR does not tinker; it does not modify the rules of existence to satisfy personal requests; it does nothing but be and watch and sometimes, love. GWAR is invisible and indetectable because GWAR does nothing. At best, one can aspire to die and become invisible and indetectable oneself, and then you’ll get to meet GWAR. No religion actually exists to support GWAR. GWAR doesn’t need them, and they don’t believe that GWAR will actually do anything for them anyway.

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Michele Bachmann, Dominionist

You must read the profile of Michele Bachmann in The New Yorker—scary stuff all the way through. It goes right down to her philosophical foundation, and it’s all this crazy Dominionist crap from Frank Schaeffer, with nods to the notorious creationist Nancy Pearcey. Do we really want an apocalyptic believer in Christian tyranny to be in the White House?