Category Religion

The Kids Are All Right

While walking back from lunch today, I saw a group of preachers in the
semicircular plaza in front of the student union. One had a big banner
telling people to repent their sins and come to Jesus Christ, and the
main ranter was wearing a sandwich board that said pretty much the
same thing in front. On the back, it had a list of people who should
beware the wrath of God, the merciful, the most compassionate. I’m
going to trust
Amanda Gibbs’s
transcript, because it sounds about right:

WARNING

Fornicators, drunkards, sodomists, pot smokers, gangster rappers, immodest women, darwinists, gamblers, feminists, socialists, abortionists, pornographers, homosexuals, jihadists, dirty dancers, hypocrites

JUDGMENT IS COMING!!!!!

I walked around the back to read the whole thing. Broke out laughing.
Saw a bunch of smiles appear among the people in the front row.

It took me back to my own student days, when
Tom Short
would stand in front of the library and rant fundamentalist Christian
inanity for hours.

It gladdened this shriveled old cynical heart to see the reaction of
the students watching today’s spectacle. It ranged from outrage to
mild amusement to wild amusement. One woman ran out to get a piece of
chalk and draw pagan signs on the ground around Ranty Sandwich Board
Guy.

So it looks to me as if the young’uns are being pushed away from
right-wing crazy religion, and toward either moderate religion or no
religion.

I struck up a brief conversation with one of the students in
attendance, in which he told me that he too had been raised Russian
Orthodox, and had been pressed into service as an altar boy a few
times. So we laughed, shook hands, and swapped stories of abusing the
communion wine.

Yeah, I think they’ll be fine.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

A while back, I was visited by a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses. At one
point, they resorted to argumentum ad wishful thinking: “Well,
don’t you want to live forever?”

They were very surprised when I said no.

Back in 2006, at the Montreal Comedy Festival, John Cleese
expressed
some of the thoughts that went into my answer (starts about 15:52 in):

I’ll tell you something sad, and it is this: as you get
older, I don’t think you laugh quite so much. The trouble is, there’s
only eight million jokes in the world. And when you’ve been doing it,
as I have, for forty-three years — I now know 7,980,000 of those
jokes. And even the ones I don’t know, I can kind of guess. I can
guess what the shape is.

I don’t laugh as much. Occasionally, when you’re young, at twenty,
you discover Buster Keaton, or in my case Peter Cook, or Woody Allen
and Steve Martin. These are great moments. But as you get older, it’s
not so frequent to be really excited by a new
discovery.

(Note: this is heavily edited for flow.)

And this is a problem with immortality: as you learn more and more,
especially in a given field, there’s less and less that’s really new,
and even that falls falls into known patterns..

I’m far from jaded, and I certainly don’t want to die just yet. But I
can see how, after two hundred years, or a thousand, or a million,
life would become dull. I don’t want to sound gloomy and pessimistic,
because there’s no cause to be. I’m sure that I’ll die regretting that
I lacked time to sample anything but the tiniest fraction of what life
has to offer. But at the same time, I can see where thing are going.

(Of course, since we’re talking about either magic or highly-advanced
technology, we can consider things like selective memory editing,
e.g., deliberately forgetting everything about Woody Allen so you can
discover him anew again. But I won’t go into that here.)

So if I were offered a shot at immortality, I’d demand an escape
clause. Better oblivion than eternal boredom.

Props to Moderate Catholics

I give moderate theists
grief
when they fail to stand up and tell the Pat Robertsons and Jerry
Falwells of the world that they’re full of crap, so it’s only fair to
give credit where it’s due:
Catholics for Choice
has issued a
report
about Bill Donohue and the
Catholic League.

It provides a good overview of how BillDo operates, including
manufacturing controversy and bullying. The most interesting part (to
me) was the section about inflated membership numbers (p. 17).

(HT PZ.)

(Update: Fixed link to the report. Thanks to alert reader Fez.)

A Gay Outing

It’s funny how you never see the sights and do the “local” stuff in your own town. I went to Paris once, and stayed with a friend who had lived there for sixteen years, and had never gone up the Eiffel Tower until I dragged him.

Me, I’ve lived in the Washington DC area for years and years and had never gone to a protest. Which seems a shame: people come from all over the country to march and protest here. For me, it’s just a Metro ride downtown.


So when I found out that there was going to be a
series of coordinated protests
against California’s Proposition 8 across the country, I figured I
should go. I’m neither gay nor Californian, but I figured I could
raise the body count. Especially since the “coordinated” part meant
that the ones in Maryland and DC were going to start at 1:30. I pity
the poor Hawaiians, who had to be out on the streets by 8:30.

Read More

Letting Go of God

Julia Sweeney
writes
that the DVD of her one-woman show Letting Go of God will be available on Nov. 21. Squeeee!

As a preview, here’s a video she uploaded of what appears to be an early version of one of the scenes in the show. If you’re offended by it, then you’re probably Bill Donohue.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNELNq4XJKs&hl=en&fs=1]

BillDo Misrepresents Prop 8

Once more, BillDo
forgot to keep his noise-hole closed:

[In an anti-Proposition 8 TV ad] Two young men, who identify themselves as being from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, knock on the door of two lesbian women announcing that “We are here to take away your rights.”
…

Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows:

“Radical homosexuals have a long history of anti-religious bigotry, so it is not surprising that with a pro-marriage initiative on the ballot in California (Proposition 8 would secure marriage as a right between a man and a woman only), they would resort to gutter tactics.

Unfortunately, Shrill Bill missed the big difference between Prop 8
and anti-gay-marriage laws passed in other states these past few
elections. Those other laws were preemptive: they were intended to
shore up the “one man, one woman” side in advance of possible court
challenges.

In California, on the other hand, gays did have the right to
marry (until Prop 8 passed, at least), and many took advantage of
that, gaining all the rights, privileges, and obligations that come
with it. Now Prop 8 is taking away those rights, rights that people
already have.

Choke on a bag of cocks, Bill.

Ray Comfort Is Making My Argument for Me!

In his
latest post,
Ray Comfort disagrees with Dawkins’s famous quip about the god of the
Old Testament being “the most unpleasant character in all fiction”.
Specifically, he takes Dawkins to task for excluding the god of the
New Testament:

The God of the New Testament is just as offensive to the
ungodly as the God of the Old Testament, because they are One in [sic]
the same.

Look at His terrible New Testament judgments: He killed a husband and wife, simply because they told one lie (see Acts 5:1-11). His “wrath” abides on every unbeliever for their sins (see John 3:36, Ephesians 5:6). He will punish the unsaved with a fearful “indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish” (Romans 2:8-9), and warns that He is going to be “revealed from Heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on those who do not know God, and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ” (see 2 Thessalonians 1:8).

He is so angry at this world He calls us His enemy (see James 4:4) and promises to “shake not only the earth, but also Heaven” in His wrath (Hebrews 12:26). Our God is “a consuming fire” (see Hebrews 12:29) and His justice will cause some to gnaw their tongues in pain (see Revelation 16:10). He is so serious about sin He will cast all liars into the lake of fire (see Revelation 21:8).

Okay, so the NT God is just as mean and nasty as the OT one.

Actually, no, he’s not:

If you still want to paint the Old Testament God as been mean and the New Testament God as being nice, please realize that the God of the New Testament proclaimed the death sentence on every man, on every woman and on every child of the human race. Every single human being will die because they have violated God’s Law (see Romans 5:12, 6:23).

The god of the New Testament is nastier, since he punishes people
forever in Hell. At least the OT god was polite enough to stop
torturing people once they were dead.

With opponents like Comfort, who needs allies?

(Matt D. says almost the same thing as I do. Except he said it to Ray directly.)

Commentary Track for Expelled

Shane Killians has
released
a subtitle track for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
that aims to correct a lot of the errors and lies in the movie. So if
someone bought the DVD and wants you to watch it, you can add
subtitles so your
friend/relative/smizmar
can get a real-time rebuttal to the claims presented on screen.

The link above includes instructions for getting the subtitles to
display in some popular media players. In addition, I think MPlayer
should automatically pick up the .srt file (dunno about the
.ssa one).

You’ll also need to buy/rent/rip/bittorrent/teleport a video file of the movie, but you’re on your own for
that.

Putting Money on the Races

I’ve just chipped in to two more races:

  • No on Prop 8, against California’s proposition 8, which would amdend the state constitution to ban gay marriage.
  • Kay Hagan, who’s running for Senate in North Carolina, because Elizabeth Dole is a loathsome bigot.

Because when a woman who knows how to use a whip and handcuffs
tells me to,
I must obey.

Unselfconscious Statement O’ the Day

Found at Dembski’s House of Evolution Denialism:

Uncommon Descent has been debunking anthropogenic global warming since the website began 3.5 years ago. We have a keen nose for bogus science here, folks.

Good thing there’s now a Micro Center in town, ‘cos I need a new keyboard.