Racist goddamned Florida

Trayvon Martin went to a convenience store in his family’s neighborhood to buy some candy. He was 17. He was unarmed. He was black.

George Zimmerman, a self-appointed “neighborhood watch leader”, called the police to report a “suspicious person”; he was told not to confront him, but somehow in the next few minutes Zimmerman got out there and shot and murdered Trayvon Martin. The puffed-up coward Zimmerman grabbed his gun, confronted a teenager carrying nothing but a bag of Skittles, and murdered him. There is no possible excuse, no way that there could be some exculpatory fact to justify his actions: Zimmerman was carrying a loaded gun and on a mission of self-inflated importance to defend his neighborhood (which was also Martin’s neighborhood) from suspicious young black men.

What do you think happened next, when the police arrived on the scene and found Zimmerman with a smoking gun, who immediately admitted to gunning Trayvon Martin down?

Nothing.

Zimmerman is still free. It’s been two weeks; no action is being taken. The Florida district attorney is even dragging his heels about deciding to investigate the murder, and claiming that Zimmerman was a pillar of the community.

Sign the petition. Tell racist goddamned Florida they can’t just ignore a vigilante who murders young black people.

It gets worse. Recordings of 911 calls on the night of the murder are available: Martin was screaming for help and begging for his life when Zimmerman gunned him down. And apparently what sent Zimmerman on his macho crusade to stop a suspicious suspect was that Martin was running away.

Why hasn’t he been arrested?

The obvious first step

Rick Santorum has promised a “war on porn if elected.

“Current federal ‘obscenity’ laws prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier,” Santorum wrote in the statement, adding that these laws should be “vigorously enforced.”

We’re going to have to define porn and obscenity for this to work. As a first step, I propose using use of the filthy word “Santorum” as an unambiguous indicator of pure smut.

Disband NASA! We have a better way!

Who needs rockets and space probes? We have Dr P. V. Vartak an MD who does experiments in his spare time. Here’s part of his list:

First experiment of Astral Travel in Samadhi to the planet Mars was performed on 10th August, 1975. A report of his 21 observations was published, out of which 20 observations were fully corroborated by the spaceship Viking 1, after 21st July, 1976, i.e. almost one year after his observations. The 21st observation about ancient water and moss on the Mars was established by another spaceship, the Pathfinder in 1987, 12 years later.

In his second experiment of Astral Travel on 12th August, 1976, he observed by Clairvoyance the docking of spaceships Viking-1 & Viking-2. Advance observation by him was subsequently confirmed by NASA on 7th Sept. 1976.

In yet another Astral Travel to the planet Jupiter on 27th August 1977 , he made 18 distinct observations on the Jupiter. Spaceship Voyager corroborated his 10 observations in 1979, while the remaining observations are yet to be tangibly proved, may be, through some future space program of humanity.

In 1980, during his Samadhi, he saw a man on a celestial body in another Solar System . He has published his findings through this transcendental feat in his book , ‘Scientific Explanation of the Katha Upanishad.’

USA had planned to launch a spaceship to the Saturn to reach & study the planet in 2004. He, through his transcendental visit to Saturn visualized that the Saturn is a ball of three types of revolving heavy gases, having purple, yellow and black shades. The famous ring of Saturn is made of some material like slurry or mud along with floating rocks. There are no land marks on the Saturn because there is no formation of land. In the third edition (2003) of his autobiography ‘ Brahmarashichi Samaranayatra’, he has published his observations about the planet Saturn.

Take that, Phil Plait! Astronomy has just become superfluous!

Unfortunately, Dr Vartak’s credibility isn’t perfect. He was a surgeon, would you believe…would you let this guy anywhere near you with a knife?

One thing he’s good for: he’s a Hindu theologian. Point some of those fanatical Christians to his publishings every time they start asserting the truth of the Bible — Vartak plays the same game of treating holy writ as scientific data, and comes to the conclusion that the Upanishads were literally true and accurate in every regard. Besides, that Jesus guy was a Tamil Hindu, don’t you know.

And Love turned into a beer bottle and got in a fight down in the Castro, while Logic manifested as a duck and quacked Desire

I know that Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican astronomer, is a nice guy, and that he supports good science…but he’s also a wackaloon who makes twisted rationalizations for god-belief. In a recent interview, that tendency is on full display.

Despite people often having the “crazy idea” that science and religion conflict, science is “really one of our best principles for getting to know God,” he told CNA.

So now god is a material, natural entity? The kind of thing that science can study? Someday, we’ll get one of these guys to actually define concretely what they mean by “god”. Not this time, though! Consalmagno is just full of squinky evasive fluff in this interview.

During his talk, titled “The Word Became Flesh,” the planetary scientist explained that modern atheists tend to understand God as being merely a force that “fills the gaps” in our understanding of the universe.

No, we don’t. I understand god as the nebulous nonsense that believers try to impose on our understanding of what we do know. Every time we call them on some babble they make about how the world works, though, they willingly and enthusiastically flee into the gaps.

I call the gaps in knowledge “gaps”. I don’t call them “gods”.

“To use God to fill the gaps in our knowledge is theologically treacherous,” Br. Consolmagno said, because it minimizes God to just another force inside the universe rather than recognizing him as the source of creation.

Oooh, “theologically treacherous”. That’s a good thing, right? I’d love to sneak up behind Theology in the dark and stab it in the kidneys.

Those who believe in God should not be afraid of science, but should see it as a an opportunity that God gave humanity to get to know him better.

No god “gave” us science. It is hard work and human effort that enables science — and what we see is a universe with no need for any deity, anthropomorphic or otherwise, and especially no need for the bizarrely quaint and exceedingly silly dogma of Jesus.

Br. Consolmagno said that he believes in God, “not because he is at the end of some logical chain of calculations” but because he “experienced what physics and logic can show me but cannot explain: beauty and reason and love.”

Oh, crap. Isn’t Consolmagno supposed to be one of the smart ones? So why is he trotting out this same stupid bullshit that Joe Doofus splutters every time he encounters an atheist? I experience beauty and love all the time; they are part of my perceptions and experience, are responses of my mind and brain, and are not invoked by some mysterious supernatural force. Dogs know love, and I suspect they recognize beauty (which is very different from our sense of beauty) — are these senses instilled by a god of dogs? I don’t think so.

The primary difference between him and atheistic scientist Stephen Hawking is that he recognizes that God is not another part of the universe that explains the inexplicable, but rather “Logos” and “Reason itself.”

The bullshit is rising. I’m drowning! Help!

If God is reason, then it does not need me to worship it, and certainly has no anthropic perspective, let alone desires or goals. It just is, like gravity or the weak force, and all the rituals and prayers and magical dogmas are irrelevant and a distraction from the reality — it means that god is the principle that atheists, not Catholics, live by, and we can just repurpose the churches as bowling alleys and dinner theaters, recycle all the bibles and print physics and chemistry and biology texts on them, and dismantle the church hierarchies and put the people to work productively. Consolmagno, for instance, could be a full-time astronomer rather than a part-time apologist for stupidity.

He spoke of the faith needed to embrace Christianity and said that although other world religions and philosophies can give us a rational view of the universe, “only the Gospel could tell us that Reason itself became flesh and dwelt among us” in the form of Jesus Christ.

Wait…what happened to that talk of god being “reason”? Now he’s suddenly meat. And sectarian meat at that.

The Incarnation is remarkable because it happened, Br. Consolmagno said, and also due to the way it occurred. In coming into the world as an infant, God “exercised a kind of supernatural restraint” which still respected the laws of nature.

This is the kind of absurd and fundamentally dishonest inconsistency I find so objectionable in religion. One minute their god is “reason” or the “ground state of all being” or some similar vague cosmic principle, and the next they’re telling us that gravity/reason/language turned itself into bare-skinned baby ape (Why? Because it wanted to!), walked around, appointed a pope, told us that women are unclean, hated a few gay people, slaughtered some fig trees and Mycobacterium leprae, violated a few laws of physics (or played some cheap magic tricks), and told us to follow a set of arbitrary parochial rules and obey a child-raping priesthood, and then vanished off to some paradise in the sky.

I know reason, Mr Consolmagno, and I think your vision of reason constitutes an extreme act of disrespect to the principle, and shows that you don’t have the slightest clue about what you’re discussing.

I get email

Yes, I still get affectionate, loving email from devout Catholics.

The gore and tenacity to take the consecrated Host and desecrate it by piercing a nail through it and discarding the Blessed Sacrament.

Your soul will plead in mercy at the final Hour of your Death.

When you are in grave pain, cry out in Mercy by saying Jesus, I Trust in You…at the final Hour of your death.

Foolish Man…What good is it for you to gain all the wisdom in the world with your professorship yet lose your soul…

I was robbed. I was supposed to get all the wisdom in the world when I became a professor? Who do I complain to about getting my due?

The Child Catchers

I like a good horror story, but sometimes I get so terrified I want to crawl under the covers and not emerge for a good long while. The books that terrify me, though, aren’t the one ones by Stephen King or Clive Barker — supernatural horror just makes me laugh — it’s the real-world scary stuff that makes me tremble. For a long time, my standard for nightmare fuel has been Jeff Sharlet’s The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. That’s a book that makes you aware of a kind of malevolent insanity gripping a significant chunk of the leadership of our country, a malignancy that goes unquestioned and even with approval. There really are monsters at the top.

But move over, Sharlet, here’s a new book that’s even scarier: The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, by Katherine Stewart. The monsters aren’t off in Washington DC, they’re right next door, and they’re coming for your children.

Stewart first notices these odd little happy Christian clubs popping up in her child’s schools, and then she digs deeper: she talks to their representatives. She attends their conventions. She takes their training courses. She sees precisely what they’re doing, and gets the words straight from their mouths: they’re out to convert every child in the world to their hateful, narrow, “Bible-believing” dogma, even while in public they claim to be ecumenical and kind and loving.

Who is “they”, you ask. It’s the Child Evangelism Fellowship, and just the name ought to chill you: this is an organized, well-funded group of people dedicated to proselytizing specifically to 4 to 14 year old children, the prime age for conversion.

They also have other goals, among them the total obliteration of public education. It’s ironic: they often take advantage of our institutions, leasing our public school buildings for church services and Sunday schools (They’re cheap! Professional, well-maintained buildings available at minimal cost), trading on the credibility of the schools (They try mightily to produce the illusion that their efforts are sanctioned by and part of the official school curriculum), yet privately they detest the whole principle of universal education, and their goal is to subvert the whole endeavor and turn education into Christian indoctrination.

They found something called “Good News Clubs” at schools, led by community volunteers, which superficially promote a kind of generic moral religiosity which often wins over culturally diverse communities — you know the ones I’m talking about, the kind where they might detest gay-hatin’, science-despisin’, Pat Robertson-style fundamentalism, but nod in happy agreement at the importance of faith, and blandly accept that religion in general is good and virtuous and that we should encourage our children to adopt a faith tradition…for their moral upbringing in an environment of conscience, don’t you know. What they don’t realize is that the Good News Clubs stealthily promote that gay-hatin’, science-despisin’, Pat Robertson-style fundamentalism directly to their children, while asking them not to talk about it to Mommy and Daddy. They will cheerfully take in the children of Catholics and Jews, so that they can tell those children that Catholics and Jews will burn in Hell.

These people are just plain evil. Sure, they’re kindly old grandmas and sincerely pious ordinary joes, but they’ve also got it in their heads that they must inject their poisonous beliefs into everyone’s children. And they are dedicated: they will make time and invest money in their cause. Fear them. They lie and fight dirty and will use your own liberal and progressive values to undermine those same values in gullible children.

These Good News Clubs are springing up all over the place, so the first thing I did when I finished the book was to look to see if there were any Good News Clubs in the Morris area schools. I found plenty in other schools — often in cheerfully bland announcements in PTA newsletters or school websites — but nothing about Morris. I breathed a sigh of relief, and thought that was one nightmare I’d dodged…and then…and then…

Child Evangelism Fellowship is targeting Minneapolis/St Paul for a major conversion effort this summer!

Capture a city for Christ! That’s the battle cry of over a hundred workers from across America who join together to “jump start” a Gospel outreach to children in a target city.

This coming summer, CEF workers will gather in the Twin Cities of Minnesota where volunteers from local churches will be trained to reach children in their area for Jesus. These same churches will continue ministry in the fall by sponsoring Good News Clubs in the public elementary schools nearby.

It’s like the monster jumping out of the grave at the very end of the horror movie! They’re coming to get us!

Listen, Minnesotans, this is your only chance. Read The Good News Club now, before it’s too late. These people will be making proposals to your schools to install a fifth column of radical evangelical Christians into privileged positions, all in order to snare the local children into a hell-and-damnation, sulfur-and-brimstone, Satan-is-out-to-get-you, boogety boo version of hateful Christianity. Your local mega-church pastors and conservative wackjobs will be encouraging this because it’s what they believe anyway; your gentle-souled namby-pamby neighbors who see nothing wrong with faith will go along because they are ignorant and unaware.

Sound the warning. They’re here already! You’re next!

Or perhaps, more accurately, the Child Catchers are coming to town.

Even more annoying, and for real

I regret to say that I introduced some of you to Eugene Delgaudio, an extraordinarily annoying spammer whose gimmick is calling himself the “Public Advocate of the United States”, writing these histrionic emails to people declaring the imminent take-over of the country by the radical homosexual lobby. All he does is scream about fear and weakness and homosexuals coming to get you, and how he needs your money to protect us all…but of course, he does nothing with your money except use it to beg for more money on the internet.

And pay himself a nice salary. He has submitted an IRS 990 form, so his budget and expenditures can actually be examined, and yeah, he’s a fraud. He pays himself about $170,000 a year, and the bulk of the rest of it goes to postage and printing for mailing out his pleas for cash.

Somebody ought to investigate him. It’s pure fear-mongering and scammery.

I get email

Those Australians…they recently ran a segment on their Dateline program featuring their fellow Australian Ken Ham and the Creation “Museum”, which includes portions of an interview with me. Actually, I seem to be the only critic to get any airtime in the show, which is flattering, but I could have used a little more support!

Anyway, the show was recently aired, my name is played up as an atheist opponent of creationist nonsense, and now I’m suddenly receiving lots of email from Australian creationists because they want to persuade me to their foolish cause. And some of them are just weird. I’m including one of the weirder ones below the fold — warning, it’s very long — in which the author uses a novel argument: the zodiac, therefore God.

This ain’t astrology: it’s that arbitrary, human-assigned labels attached to groupings of stars can be rationalized into Christian symbology, therefore, the stars are evidence of the truth of the Bible. It’s one of the sillier arguments I’ve seen. Would you believe that the Sphinx is a Christian testimony, since it binds together a virgin woman (Mary) and a lion (Jesus)? Centaurs represent “Christ’s dual nature”. You can just imagine what he does with Virgo and the Southern Cross.

And then he does the usual thing of claiming that the Bible foretold legitimate scientific conclusions: Somehow, “He [God] set a compass [circle] upon the face of the deep” becomes a biblical explanation that the Earth is spherical. How do you draw a sphere with a compass?

It is grammatically well written, he spells my name correctly, and he uses paragraph breaks, so it’s a step above what I usually get. But behind the superficial courtesies, there lies a brain that has totally stripped its gears and lost most of its connections to reality.

(Also on Sb)

[Read more…]

I get email

You cannot imagine the volume of stupid that arrives in my mailbox. Here’s yet another example.

Hello Prof,

An atheist 150years ago would have said it is impossible to have a conversation with someone not with you, whom you’ve never seen, or can’t see, but today telephones make it seen very possible.

Have atheist believe that it’s impossible change?

What’s you’re take on this historic and present day disparity?

Thanks,
andre

An atheist 150 years ago would have been thoroughly comfortable with the concept of mail, and would have had many conversations with people they’d never met. Charles Darwin, for instance, carried on extensive conversations through correspondence with people in whole countries he’d never visited. Most people were aware that the world was much bigger than their local village, and read travelogues and articles and saw magic-lantern shows that documented the existence of all these exotic places and people.

So the disparity is nonexistent, and hasn’t been the case for a few thousand years. Telephones merely add greater immediacy to communications around the world. They don’t add any significantly greater evidence that there is more to the world than the small group of people we can see right now.

But OK, Andre is trying to play a particularly idiotic game to justify belief in gods. Tell ’em to give me a magic phone call, and give me direct evidence of their existence. And just to magnify the stupidity of Andre’s implied argument…what kind of evidence for a deity would it be if my phone rings, I answer, and a voice says, “I am Vishnu. Worship me!”?