Fundamentalism Gone Sideways

Tags

Extreme right-wing, fundamentalism, theocracy

Anyone who knows me at all well, knows that I’m a bit of a crusader when it comes to fundamentalism. Since I fully admit that, I never ask people to accept my conclusions without good documentation.

I’ll try to be nice here, but please don’t hold me to it.

First of all, fundamentalist Christians refuse to accept that this description to the left is actually what is described in Genesis as the structure of the earth and universe. As you can see, it is not a globe at all, but rather a series of pillars, o’er covered with a “dome” with water above it, and of course below. The sun and visible planets and stars are inside the dome.

If you read the flood stories, you will note that this depiction allows for the waters to both arise from the earth and the sky. It also accounts for the oft-heard phrase, “four corners of the earth”. The “earth” was actually a flat disk. This is acknowledged by Jewish experts who ought to understand their own texts better than others, one would think.

Since even the most staunch Christian fundie accepts the spherical actuality of the globe, you can see why they can’t accept this actual description of Genesis but must fudge it to account for reality.

My point is simply that fundamentalism is based in large part on a fanatical belief in the truthiness of a book, and it is a self-serving literal-ness at best. In this they are no different from other fundamentalists in other religions. As any Muslim will tell you, fundamentalist jihadists misread and twist the Quran in a similar fashion in order to get it  to “say what they want it to say.”

Suggesting that all fundamentalists are cut from the same cloth,  sets the Christian right on edge. They deny it of course. Indeed if you look at the Wikipedia entry on fundamentalism, you discover that it is not limited to even religion at all but pertains to any ideology which is reduced to an irreducible set” of precepts which cannot be deviated from in any respect. A strict literalism is imposed as to the agreed upon rules.

Bob Altemeyer has done some exceptional work in this area, and makes his main research “The Authoritarians” avail as a PDF file here.  The Wikipedia entry, while certainly nothing  but a starting point, has a fine bibliography to get your started located here.  Psychology has done much work in the area and you might start with this Pathos article, which will lead you to books and studies. Another well-researched book might be The Fundamentalist Mind by Strozier, Termen, Jones, and Boyd. This should help get you started if you wish to learn more. Again, don’t accept my word for it, go to the actual sources.

My point is not to rehash what is common knowledge, among anyone who wants to understand why we are troubled in this country with a segment of society which continues to place it’s personal religious interests above the common good, and most would say common sense. It is rather to point out by the above, that these are not choices made by rational minds, but rather what certain brain configurations are prone to fall into. Since in most cases it is extremely hard to eradicate or upset these mindsets, the only solution is to be ever vigilant to keep them out of the decision-making arenas of our common lives.

This we have done a poor job of doing.

Since we believe that religion is a matter of personal preference, we are loath to interrupt those preferences by any sort of “test” to eliminate those belief systems that threaten us all. And I agree that we should continue to do so. But we must also recognize that there are those among us who want a world much different from the one we inhabit. It is their stated purpose and their heartfelt belief that we should all be forced if necessary to accept their world vision in the guise of a government reactive to their vision of God.

They believe in a nutshell that all laws must be referenced to a book, the Bible in this case, and that of course they will tell you what the Bible says should be the law.

You may or not be aware that James Inhofe, (R-Ok) is the new chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Inhofe has for years argued that climate change is a hoax. Inhofe has received, tens of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel interests to fund his campaigns. Of course he tells you that he is a true believer, and perhaps that is true. It is always hard to say. But in any case, the Senator is prepared to argue that 98% of the scientific community is wrong on the issue of man-made climate change, and that his fundamentalist-driven approach is true.

What Inhofe admits, is that it doesn’t matter if climate change is occurring. Man is arrogant to go against God in this matter. As his proof he raises Genesis 8:22 which is God’s promise:

As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”

Of course they also interpret that “as long as the earth endures” involves a “self-correcting resilience” that they nowhere find in the bible, but assume.

What I am being asked to accept is that the US and by implication no one else, should do anything about the clear evidence of a catastrophe in the making because of what a few people who are in no way experts in either the bible or the science of climate have decided is best for us all. Are you willing to stake the lives of your children and grandchildren on their being right?

Is Inhofe any different from the thousands who have gone to stand upon hilltops on the appointed day and hour to await the second coming, always to return home at dawn, a home that often no longer is theirs since they have sold or given away everything to insure God knows them as the true believers they profess to be?

Are we to go instead to live in Chief Justice Roy Moore’s world in Alabama? Judge Moore tells the Governor in that state to ignore a legal judicial pronouncement from a federal court on the illegality of a  gay marriage ban because the judge has determined that the bible told him otherwise, and by fiat he proclaims the federal court decision as “unconstitutional.”

So much for the rule of law. While running for governor himself, Moore decried evolution teaching as “distorting our way of thinking”. Yet, the electorate in Alabama saw fit to elect him as Chief Judge of their Supreme Court, making him the greatest interpreter of the law in the state. This is sanity?

My point is that these people are dangerous to OUR life. We can laugh at them, we can face palm their stupidity and their childish emotional needs all we want, but they have carefully and for the most part quietly wormed their way into positions of power within our country. They have infiltrated school boards, city councils, state legislatures, and obviously on into our higher governmental positions where they, armed with pseudo-science and pseudo-theology, restructure our laws to fit their kingdom to come as they view it.

We ignore them at our peril. If we don’t stand against this sort of soft-headedness, we cannot expect an electorate who by and large is too busy to think these things through themselves to do it for us. We will find ourselves soon before the modern-day Inquisition defending truth against a country that is now governed by a rabble of no longer able or willing to discern truth from fantasy religious fanatics. They are NO DIFFERENT THAN JIHADISTS PEOPLE.

You have been warned.

 

 

It Wasn’t THAT Long Ago. . . .

Tags

abortion, contraception, fundamentalism, GOP, Hobby Lobby, Women's issues

A little history seems in order.

Okay, so before we start, let’s get this straight. This is not an anti-male diatribe, much as you may think it is. There are damn well plenty of stupid women out there who have drunk the kool-aid and think women’s place is in the home, tending the kitchen, children and pets, in that order. The trouble is, the women who tell you that are ANYTHING BUT stay-at-homers themselves and even if they are, they are writing blogs, books, and preachin’ on social media that YOU should not be like them, but rather like the fantasy women they envision–pampered, protected, cared for, and wiper of runny noses all wearing that crisp peter pan-collared cotton frock and perfectly shined respectable two-inch pumps and pushing the vacuum with a free hand.

Whew. . . .

No this is against paternalism and all its ugly underbelly of psychological signals that tell the female gender that they are all they can be just by primping in front of the mirror and making very sure that that eyeliner is on straight and that lipstick is the latest fashion color of the season.

Ya see, I grew up in that tween place, on the cusp, able to see both shores as it were.

Women got the vote in 1920. My mother was born in ’26, so she grew up having it, though I must say, she pretty much used is as far as I can tell, as her husbands explained to her was right and good. But her mother came into her adulthood without it, my grandmother was born in ’01, so it impacted her most. I knew these women for whom the vote was a “new” thing,  but grew up knowing that voting was no different for me than for any guy I knew.

It was not until the 60’s, during the general period of awakening that lots of minorities were going through, least of all white males who were being conscripted to be the fodder in another war, but one this time that seemed to merit no one’s patriotic fervor, that we women began to learn of our own deeper oppression. We began to learn that it was not okay that our bodies were not our own to control, that we were not by “nature” relegated to certain types of jobs, and paid less in others simply because we were women.

We learned that there was much more to do in this journey to equality.

And we secured our right to control our bodies–in other words–to make mistakes just like men do with theirs.

And we worked hard to break through glass ceilings that prevented us from being fighter pilots, (if that’s what we wanted), neurosurgeons, police officers, firefighters,  and corporate CEO’s. And then we discovered that even when we got the jobs we didn’t get the pay, and we began that fight too.

Always with a certain segment of scared men and the women they controlled telling us that we were going against God, country, and well, nature itself.

Always with those who believed that as we gained our power to control our lives, theirs would somehow be diminished. Sharing is a hard lesson to learn.

They argued of course that women would become “just like men”, or worse, punish men in some Amazonian-driven lust for power themselves.

They argued that we would cry during tense negotiations with a Khrushchev and rain down upon America the nuclear holocaust that permeated the Cold War era.

They called us atheistic feminists and the spittle trickled down their chins, catching and rerouting through grizzled stubble, that they wiped away with grubby fingers still clutching ragged signs with misspelled words echoing their hate: Back to the kitchen you sluts!

But while these battles went on quietly across America with thousands of dedicated women, all the clamor died down, and life didn’t change a whole lot. We figured we were still on the journey, but life as we know it hadn’t stopped, and someday we would reach our goal of full integration and equality in America. Most of us thrived in a world that seemed increasingly equal to us.

And then along came the “IMMORAL MINORITY”  waving their bibles, and explaining to middle-aged white men who had failed in the great American dream to be great achievers, that women were the problem and not corporate greed. Women were and always were the problem ever since that bitch picked that apple off that tree and seduced God’s great creation Adam into sinning. Women were the problem.

And as the rich got richer and the poor got poorer and the great middle started to age and find that damn they weren’t much better off than their parents, some thing had to give. Corporate America became adept at focusing the blame on minorities, takers all. Suddenly, feminism became a dirty word again. Our enemies are mostly aging white men who feel left behind (damn that Rapture, where are you?). The feel and it’s certainly palpable at this point, emasculated by articulate, educated women.

Ask me about it. I belong to a forum of my old high school, and my wars always end up being against these male types (one of which actually said that he ended up calling me names because “I drove him to it.”), and women who believe that women were created to serve me according to their fine uneducated reading of certain pseudo-Pauline texts.  And invariably they block me, so I can read the their comments and they don’t have to respond to mine. Except that there are men on the forum who are just as liberal as I am, just as knowledgeable, and just as “in-your-face”, and they don’t get blocked. Why? Because men can argue with men, but women must be very careful to be properly respectful lest they be branded as “stupid” and “a troll” and “self-defined intellectual”. (I was once told that educated people were “pissants” all, by one tiny-penised patriarchal dope.)

So along comes Hobby Lobby and it’s claim that its corporate religiosity is being assaulted by requiring it “pay” for certain contraceptive methods it in its utter stupidity deems abortifacients, and the Feds have no right to make them offer same to their employees. There is so much wrong here that it’s sick. First, HL provided all these methods before they were picked as the “plaintiff” and then told, “damn, guys, you offer this stuff already!” Hobby Lobby owner Green claims “shit, I have no idea”. Hobby Lobby gets I would guess 80% of its inventory from China, a nation that makes abortion a national policy and until recently required it after one child. Hobby Lobby has a 401K retirement benefits package which includes owning shares of various big pharma companies which, you guessed it, manufacture all the abortifacients that HL moans about.

So the SCROTUS decided that corporate religious well-being trumps women’s rights to good health. Along with that, they decided that there can be no buffer zone between women trying to enter clinics that offer contraceptive care along with abortions and those who want to scream at them demanding that they “think again”.  Women seeking treatment at a PPH clinic must be within “spittin’ distance” of those who seek to turn them away.

Across America, Republican led legislatures make it hard if not impossible for poor women to get reproductive care of any kind by loading down clinics with regulations (aren’t Republicans against business regulation as a matter of principle?) that are so burdensome that they have to close.

And all this in the name of NOT ABORTING. When all of these restrictions do exactly the opposite.

Republicans in Congress vote down equal pay for women.

There is a line.

It has now been crossed.

We will not go back.

Vote in 2014 as if you life depends on it, because control of it is surely at stake.

 

 

 

 

Undoing Christianist Drivel One Knot at a Time

Tags

Christianist, damnable lies, fundamentalism

It’s been a week of people pissin’ me off.

Not that my personal life has been that way. No, thankfully, it’s been rather grand, with the kitchen redo going splendidly and my beloved and I agreeing on most every sub-step of that adventure. Who woulda guessed we would agree on faucets!

But oh, the lame-minded Christianists have been pushing my button once again, but given their IQ limitations, what could one expect.

I also garnered another bit of info that stands to reason given their lacking abilities as well.

So let’s get to setting some records straight.

Facebook memes are funny things as I’ve stated before. Some are quite accurate, but a whole lot tend to seem superficially so but fail in the deeper contemplation.

Sometimes, they are blatant lies from start to finish.

A Christianist “friend” of mine on Facebook (you know the term I trust–one who proclaims Jesus as their one and only but uses the bible and their faith to justify hating who they already hate/fear/are jealous of, etc. [Facebook “friend” being a loose term at best for people who read your shit and whose stuff you are subjected to as is the case here]), posted a meme that on its face was silly, stupid, untrue, hateful, and most UnChristian-like in every single respect.

The pastor of this “friend” allegedly  quoted from some other dude, something to this effect: (I have to paraphrase because the said Christianist when confronted with actual facts, deleted the entire meme from her wall rather than allow any of her “friends” to see actual facts.)

“Rome had a lot of “rabble” who were taken care of by the Roman government. But instead of being satisfied, they just demanded more and more, until finally Rome was bankrupt and then this rabble sacked the city, which was, as we all know, the end of Rome. America too has it’s “rabble”, which was corrected identified as the 47% by that paragon of goodness (my hyperbole) Mr. Romney, who was utterly vilified for stating what turned out to be the truth. Now we are saddled with a government (Obama of course) which has allowed/created a (1) housing crisis (2) runaway debt through over spending (3) a huge deficit (4) Obamacare and (4) insufficient sun on Sunday! (okay I added that). But the rabble won’t stop demanding and of course the inference is clear–so will go the way of America just like Rome.”

Oh where to begin.

First of all, pretty much all that Rome did for the citizens of Rome was provide bread to those who were starving, along with olive oil and wine. The only other thing provided was entertainment in the guise of the circuses. Rome was not sacked by its urban poor, although surely there were uprisings from time to time but these were not threatening to Rome’s existence.

Rome fell through a series of invasions by outsiders called “barbarians” (some of whom were no doubt the very ancestors of idiots like the above who don’t know history at all). Does the name Visigoth mean anything to you? How about the Vandals?

So it is utterly false to claim that the “rabble” destroyed Rome because they weren’t given what they wanted.

What was this “rabble” of Rome? They were in fact urban poor, citizens of the state but with no land, and no ability to make a living. Sort of like people in the US who have lost their jobs when their company chose to build a cheap factory overseas and employ cheap labor. Sort of like people who are trying to raise families on non-living wages. Sort of like small business owners and farmers pushed out of a living by mega corporations who undercut them in prices so deeply that they can’t compete. Sort of like that.

But more than that, they WERE THE FREAKING PEOPLE JESUS CALLED US ALL TO CARE FOR.

The Christianist now calls the poor, the 47% or rabble.

And then we go to Obama.

Now under no circumstances that remotely relate to truth is Obama responsible for the housing melt-down. That happened as we all recall under the watch of wonder boy, George. Now we know that the demise of Glass-Steagall had much to do with that, and Democrats bear their responsibility in that as well, but please, it cannot be laid at the feet of Obama.

Obama did not “run up massive deficits” either, but has paid them down and kept spending to levels not seen since Eisenhower. It was boy George who did that, but beginning and running two wars and a drug prescription law on a credit card.

Now I pointed all these pesky facts out in my comments. And of course, what happened is that the meme was deleted. Not with an “oh thanks for the information, my bad” but just deleted. I might have ignored this had I not found a similar in tone meme (the left is “intolerant of ideas” –the ideas being my bigoted thoughts about transgendered people “deciding to be girls so they can use women’s locker rooms”) that had not been deleted but deleted to remove the comments I made, and then reposted. This one also was applauded by the woman’s “pastor” as good Christian truth.

In perusing the wall, I noted a remark made that suggested why this woman gets so much wrong: “I do my best never to watch the news.”

I’m tired of people who use religion to hide behind all the while twisting it into grotesque shapes to fit their sick fears and hatreds. They are not Christians at all.

Next up, what’s happening in Demagography today!

The Pretzel God

Tags

creationism, evolution, fundamentalism, ham, ID, Nye, science

I found myself once again engaged in that never-to-be-solved conversation with a creationist, commonly referred to as a YEC’er (young-earth creationist). That such conversations are tedious is obvious. I never sought it, rather the usual folks just have to respond when you make fun of their favorite belief.

The other day I posted  a thing from Buzzfeed, which merely and perfectly objectively showed the “questions” that some YEC’ers would have asked Bill Nye after attending the “debate” at the Creation “Museum” run by Ken Ham. Ken Ham is either a silly lunatic who believes the nonsense that spews from his mouth, or he is a grifter. I’m not quite sure which.

Actually Buzzfeed, I now find, has answered these 22 questions, sometimes humorously, but always factually as far as my knowledge goes. My post was met by, not a reasoned response but the highly laughable video created by one Ray Comfort called Evolution vs God. In it Ray confronts a few professors but mostly students and demands that they produce a “change of kinds” that he can see, peppered with the now standard question, “were you there?” The upshot seems to be the rather bizarre notion that Ray has that if “you were not there, you can’t prove it happened.”

Now we already know Ray from his enormous boo-boo in the Banana Proof, calling it the “evolutionist’s nightmare. Here Ray tells us that the banana is clear evidence of something created by God just to fit the hand of the human being. We will skip his retraction when he learned about how the banana has been altered by humans and no longer resembles what it did originally and well, how monkeys of course seem to have hands that work pretty darn good too in eating bananas.

Now I did not watch the famous debate between Nye and Ham. Both sides undoubtedly have not changed their mind one whit nor anyone elses. Both sides will claim victory. That Ham, as I’ve been told, made lots of assertions without any proof such as “it is not proven that the earth is old”, when it clearly is, is par for the course.

The reality of all this is that the only real loser here was Intelligent Design. Actually I was a bit surprised to learn that the ID folks hate the YEC folk. See, the ID people actually in some cases are scientists, and they are trying mightily, though usually falling short, in bringing some actual science to the discussion. They, for instance, don’t believe at all in a young earth. They simply believe in a grand master God who created such things that they say are “irreducibly complex”–God is the designer of such things as the eye , and the blood clotting cascade. So Ham really screwed them  in their longed for resurrection from the damned which occurred in the case of Tammy Kitzmiller, et al vs. Dover Area School District, et al. (400 F. Supp. 2d 707, Docket no. 4cv2688).

The meme above gives voice to the real problem with these fringe fundamentalists. And fringe is what I do mean. While Ham and his cohorts often tout the “fact” that nearly 50% of all Americans believe in creationism, that is not at all accurate. As with all polling, how the question is framed matters greatly. When you get to the extreme of a Ham–the earth is only a few thousand years old, ditto the universe, and Adam and Eve were the original humans, and the bible (usually only the KJV translation) is the literal word of God–we are talking about something less than 10% of the population.

The problem is this: faith is a matter of belief. People who assert (and it’s always these ultra uber “Christians” or extreme fundamentalists who do) that they are “positive” “sure” “absolutely certain” that what they belief is true, are deluded by their own arrogance. Faith is belief. More clearly it is belief in the face of doubt. Some of the most famous of saints struggled the most with their faith–languishing for years in doubts and questioning. Ironically, if God were as the uber fundies contend–a god of judgment, they would fail. It is no great thing to believe what is proven. Faith is believing in spite of doubt. I suspect a god of judgment would favor the one who believes in spite of doubt rather more than the one who believed because he was convinced the proof was complete. Don’t the atheists do as much?

Worse, the YEC’er likes to claim that they “follow the word of God”, in other words, they do the bidding of God which is clearly set out in their translation. But this is false. For the bible is not something that is capable of one and only one meaning, not in its sum or in its parts. It is an interpretive document, informed by many other disciplines. For instance the word na ‘ar in Hebrew literally means “youth”. The word zaqen literally means “old”. However it would be a mistake to conclude that a youth is younger than an old person. For from learning about the sociology of ancient Israel, we learn that the term youth is attached to any male not yet head of a household, while old is attached to any male who is head of a household. Thus a na ‘ar can be older than a zaquen. (From Method Matters: Essays on the Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, “Sociological Approaches: Toward a Sociology of Childhood in the Hebrew Bible” pg. 262,[Society of Biblical Literature: Atlanta, 2009]

Fundamentalists will deny all this simply because they truck in being able to discern the meaning of scripture by reading it. In that way it is they who believe in the “their own vain thoughts”, not the scholar who knows that the texts are not literal in nature, and that translation and context mean everything to meaning. God is twisted in the fundamentalist mind to fit what the mind needs Her to be.

My fundamentalist opponent dropped her side of the conversation after I produced any number of critiques of Ray Comfort’s silly video. That is the way of all such people, for in the end, they have no facts that they can articulate beyond scraps of talking points that they essentially don’t understand in the first place. She left with this parting shot, from Matthew 7:6:

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast
ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them
under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

Ironically, it is one of the more controversial passages from the Sermon on the Mount, and there is much disagreement of what it means. But I’m betting she is sure what it means. And that says it all.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Idiots

Tags

absurdity, atheism, faith, fundamentalism, God, religion

My utter disgust and disregard for fundamentalist is well documented on this blog. I make no apologies for it, though I would argue that I am no zealot in this regard, and I am not on a campaign against them as a mission. My mind is far too eclectic in its selection of “things of interest” for that to be so.

I write of politics and my utter disgust and disregard for much of the GOP as well. It is not a mission with me either.

I believe totally in evolution as the means by which life has changed over eons of time. I believe that climate change is real and we are a major causative factor.  Similarly I believe that today is Thursday and that the sun will set in the West.  These are all factually provable items, available to be tested by a variety of reality-based mechanisms.

None of these things so I obsess about, for as I said, much else in the world interests me, such as who is the killer in the new show The Bridge, who will get kicked off Big Brother tonight, and what restaurant shall we eat lunch at today. I am a liberal or progressive, and I heave mightily to the left side of those spectrums, but sometimes extreme liberals/progressives piss me off with their short-sightedness from my point of view. I don’t obsess about that either.

As I said, I’m not a zealot, but a jack-of-all-trades. I likes what I likes and don’t likes what I don’t likes and I’ll tell you about most of them, and defend them until I get bored and move onto something else. I figure I’m fairly sane, fairly smart, and fairly normal and average.

But some folks ( religious fundamentalists for sure, and atheists of the newer type) are zealous. They are on a mission. And I’m here to tell you, that when viewed from the psychological lens, then are very hard to tell apart. I have almost always referred to fundamentalists as religious in nature. But that is not correct. Fundamentalism is a mental disorder or at least is thought so by some. It relates to a type of mind that is fearful of the world and thus creates a reality that is comfortable. It gathers “facts” to support its desired outcome, and is largely impervious to new facts that might contradict the contrived reality. It takes comfort in being a “minority”, being special, in the know, and therefore “better” than others. It regularly trashes non-believers as hell-bound, or not intelligent. It is a cultish worship of a world that works for it.

And folks it applies to the “New” atheist as much as the religious fundamentalist. Having spoken to a few dozen of these new atheists, I think I can safely speak about them. Almost universally they were either once fundamentalist believers, or were raised atheistic to begin with. But in each case, a traumatic occurrence happened and they became crusaders out to crush religion as some evil creation and one that is responsible for literally every bad thing that has ever happened in the world.

But let’s examine the patient. Atheists are fond of turning the tables in any discussion with them by asserting that the “one who asserts God exists must prove that existence.” And then they go about demanding that God be proven by a methodology that is designed to work in a physical universe. This would be fine if of course God was discernible by test tubes and spectroscopes.

If science tells us anything, it tells us that at the truly small end of things, the laws don’t operate quite the same as they do on our sensory levels. A thing can be at two places at the same time, and observing a thing can alter its behavior. There are posits of more planes of existence, some eleven I’m told, and that each may have its own laws, utterly alien to our own. But they continue to demand that God be proven to their satisfaction by human scientific standards.

They refuse (a no-information zone) to accept that they cannot prove to anyone’s satisfaction that God does not exist. All they can point to is a lack of scientifically generated evidence that he does.

Let me ask it another way.

Prove that the universe is a meaningless existence. Prove that it has no purpose whatsoever. Prove that it just came into being somehow, and is going through this process of evolution and that it all will end somehow and maybe or maybe not start again, in the same unendingly mindless way.

For you posit such a universe.

We are here by a series of accidents, we live for a short period, and we dissolve into nothingness, which billions of others perhaps on billions of other “earths” do the same, all for no purpose whatsoever. This is the world of Albert Camus, life is absurd.

If it is absurd then what is the point? What has ever been the point? Why have we crawled from the cave to get into our Prius’s and drive to work creating balance sheet profits for companies who will fight to avoid giving us a pension all to sit in the sun watching the balance of our lives fade with the sun? How have we found the guts and fortitude to deny ourselves, to be honest, to help others, if only to die inevitably?

Leave a legacy? Give my kids a better life? You have no ability to feel the satisfaction after you die. You have no legacy to watch mature and give birth to your great-great-great grandchildren. You can claim the satisfaction now, but is that but a joke you play on yourself? If you find life to be hard, filled with obstacles, potholes and down-right evil meanness at least some of the time, why not save your progeny that suffering by not bringing them into the world?

Seeing it from your perspective, why feed the homeless man? You but prolong his misery? The end remains the same. Oblivious death?

Or is it as Camus suggests to you? That accepting all of the above is the final freedom–the freedom to not give a damn? But of course you claim that not to be true, for you claim a morality that is as good, nay better than the religious believers you call names and make such fun of. Your freedom cannot be of the Camus variety.

Yes, you are moral people. Morality is I believe a genetic trait that we have found conducive to life. But you have no corner on intelligence my new atheist friends. You like to think you do, but you don’t.

You hold onto this religion of yours, for indeed it is that, because it makes you feel superior. You smugly look down upon others who believe in God as some sort of child who doesn’t have the presence of mind to know a fact from a fairy tale. Yet you who proclaim the scientific method and profess to understand the rigors of research inquiry, utterly refuse to even consider that the bible you ridicule can be read ANY OTHER WAY THAN THE SAME WAY THE FUNDAMENTALISTS YOU HATE READ IT.

That is rich indeed, for you give them the license to dictate the terms of the debate. And the truth is, you can’t allow that there are other, scholarly ways to interpret scripture, for then your fun would be over. You don’t see it that way of course, because you are on a mission, a mission to destroy religion.

And I’m not utterly opposed to that. Religion is an institution, and institutions need people to run them. And people who are beholden to institutions for their livelihood, are inclined to want the institution to grow bigger and richer, for that makes them more powerful and richer. Lots of nasty things happen as a result.

But faith is another thing entirely. You understand only one perverted facet of it and then extrapolate it to the rest because it works for you that way. That is not reality, but you are information proof.

But don’t get me wrong here. I don’t want to convert you. You are fine in your atheism as far as I’m concerned. No God that I understand wishes to punish you for your lack of progress. Humanity is a work in progress. Not all are as enlightened, and that doesn’t mean I’m somehow better than you because I see the world differently. It will all go as it is supposed to, for evolution is always upward. If we don’t blow ourselves to smithereens with our constant bickering.

I don’t seek to convert you but you seek to convert me. And that is a problem. I don’t seek to convert religious fundamentalists either, but I do seek to prevent them from homeschooling their children into their disease. And I do seek to prevent them from making me live in a society of their making. Minding one’s own business is the key, if you get my drift.

And that is the sad thing.

You are not stupid. But you are willfully ignorant. You cannot make it go away by refusing to examine it. Isn’t that kinda basic to a science-based belief system?

Related articles

• Before You Sympathize with Reza Aslan, Remember What He Said About the ‘New Atheists’ (patheos.com)
• Atheists: Who Are They? (musicalhumanist.wordpress.com)
• Is Moderate, Rational Atheism a Fallacy? (hebrewhutong.wordpress.com)
• Why Atheists & Theists are Stuck in the Same Ethical Boat (appliedsentience.com)

I Have Nothing to Wear to a Funeral

Tags

fundamentalism, gay rights, GOP, religion, social issues, teabaggers, women's rights

Disclaimer! This is not original thought. I give all credit to Andrew Sullivan in his thought-provoking remarks here. He makes some very cogent points, and when you add up the evidence, I think he might well be right.

Sullivan argues that the GOP as it exists today has ceased to be a political party. It no longer acts rationally, from a national party point of view, but rather has been captured by a group and is being forced to take on its persona.

He argues that the GOP is now nothing more than a religious party.

Think of a snake devouring a furry mouse, swallow by swallow until it simply disappears and is digested to be no more.

National political parties exist for the purpose of ostensibly giving voice to their constituents. We can of course argue that neither the Democrats nor the GOP exist for that purpose any more, but rather as a vehicle by which to motivate their constituents to vote them into office with the promise that it will benefit them. The book of apologies for not doing that is of course at the ready and is every two or four years, dragged out and used to “explain” why it was not possible to do most of what was promised.

National parties, however, tend to the flock if you will, by making it appear that they truly care.

We have terms for the political spectrum. Libertarian, Progressive, Liberal, Conservative, Reactionary, Anarchist, and so forth. Those terms are defined, and have over the eons of political discourse starting at least in Athens, come to mean something. But in this country, Sullivan argues that the term Conservative no longer means what it means around the world. For in this country, so-called Conservatives don’t act that way at all.

In England and in Australia, the Conservatives support gay rights. It is logical that they do so. They see it as a conservative thing. Since the objections to marriage equality come almost exclusively from the religious sector of society, true conservatives are determined to keep religion out of the governing region, as we too, by our Constitution, claim to desire.

Yet in this country, people who call themselves conservatives are vehemently opposed marriage equality. Moreover, these same people are exceedingly happy to have the state involved in women’s bodies.

Across the country in states controlled by Republican majorities, we find bill after bill  determined to interfere with Roe v Wade, bills  that are patently unconstitutional on their face. Planned Parenthood, the rallying point for so many Tea People, is facing such an onslaught of legislation deemed “regulatory” that it is closing offices all over. Women who wish abortions now face the real problem of transporting themselves hundreds of miles to find a provider. This is intended. It is working.

Every means is being used to embarrass and shame women, by forcing them like children to view sonograms, and endure body probes, and various “counseling” because surely women don’t understand what’s in their uterus.

These are not conservative actions. They are actions of those who wish the government to be MORE, not less intrusive in their lives. Except of course the rub is obvious–they don’t intend the intrusion to be in their lives–just yours.

If that is true of conservatives, what can be said of Libertarians who are even more hysterical at the idea of government. Yet Rand Paul, the libertarian + teabagger, finds himself not only opposing abortion and apparently in favor of all these attacks on women’s rights, but is also against marriage equality, finding, as insane as it sounds, that it will surely lead to marriage with animals.

A true conservative would be in favor (one would think) in their being as little government intrusion into the sacred sphere of voting. Yet across the land, conservative-held states are enacting again and again laws that make it more difficult to vote, at least for certain segments. Tea baggers, without batting an eye will tell you that they aren’t really sure that non-property owners should vote.

While some of the old-timer Republicans see the necessity of reaching out to the gay community and the Latino community as a means of party survival, not so the teabaggers. They figure that there must be a way to.” get more “white people to vote for them.” Do you hear that? Let’s become the White Party! What could be wrong with that?

And indeed, I suspect that the average teabagger, uneducated as they usually are, would agree. In the fundamentalist world they live in, Cain was that dark one who was banished. The mark of Cain has always been “being born black” to that crowd. It remains such, no matter how much the rhetoric changes. It spawns the “playing the race card” defense and the “uncle Tom black Republicans” we see today.

Couple that with the conservative love for loyalty to one’s “tribe” and suspicion of those not “one of us”, and you have all the makings for a racism that simply over rides common sense and evidence.

It brings you the likes of Phyllis Schafly and her continuous assertions that Latinos aren’t “our kind“, and should be ignored by the new GOP.

But it brings forth more than racism.

It brings forth the true agenda of the new GOP.

It has everything to do with theocracy. It has everything to do with scrapping the Constitution in favor of a new one that keeps the white folk in charge, and the “right” church pews filled.

In Pennsylvania, a right-winger blocked the floor speech of a fellow legislator, using a technical procedural objection, simply because he believed that his colleague was going to “speak against God’s law.”

Did you get that?

A elected legislator stopped another duly elected legislator from speaking on the floor of their state house, because he was going to, (he thought) speak against God’s law (as he interpreted it of course.)

How insane is that?

I assumed that following the whippin’ the GOP took in 2012, they would purge themselves of the virus.

I was wrong.

You see some attempt to do so in the Senate, but Cruz ignores the Old Guard.

Boehner is too in love with being called Mr. Speaker to stop them. He’s allowed them to control the House, and will reap the rewards of that decision in the future one hopes.

But an effective party?

The GOP is fading into oblivion and is being transformed into a party of crazy white people who have an unhealthy and wrong understanding of Christianity. They are pretty much convinced that all would be well if only “we” weren’t here, or in charge, or having any say in the way things are done.

So, yeah, it’s a funeral. And frankly, I’m going to miss the GOP. The New GOP? Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The Funky World of Creationism

Tags

creationism, evolution, fundamentalism, religion, science

Creationist people are funny. I mean that literally. It’s only fair, they take everything literally too. Well, sort of. It’s a well-known fact and easily provable, that creationists only take what they like in the bible literally–the rest, they ignore.

I continue to post really great stuff on Facebook, most of it from scientists who happen to also be believers. I spread it around. There are Catholics, and Lutherans, and Presbyterians, you know, mainstream religious folks. And they all point out the silliness of trying to claim that the earth was formed in six days.

Normal people nod their heads and wonder what all the fuss is about, since logic is a part of daily life you know. I mean if evolution were not true, then when the human genome project was completed, there would have been a hue and cry of world-wide proportions had the DNA not supported our evolution from “lesser”beings. As it turns out, we learned something we had not thought true–some homo-sapiens today actually have DNA from Neanderthals in their bodies, proof that a more primitive humanoid actually mated with those who would ultimately become us.

All this is beyond the average creationist of course, since they are unable to wrap their compartmentalized minds around actual facts. Life is so much simpler when you simply decide what would make you happy and then “make it so” in your mind. There are dozens of shysters out there willing to take you money in return for a good sounding story that meets your needs.

Of course, such mindless ones are also prone to “doubt” anything else that they find troubling in their white-centric (and that is most always the case) world. They stout-fastly deny that the earth as portrayed in the bible is FLAT and that the “heavens” are a dome which keeps out the “waters” which surround everything. No, that doesn’t work for them, so literalism takes a flying leap off the edge on that one.

Since I was peppering the Facebook page with a lot of actual *gasp* science, one of our creationist types figured to “get enlightened” so on the advice of others of her myopic kind, she ordered her some books from a site that specializes in helping people remain god-awful ignorant of the truth.

And she read them.  Or at least tried to.

And then she told the Facebook crowd all about what she had learnt. It had to do with “if the earth was so old then we would all be buried under tons of cosmic dust”, and something about you know crab nebula only occurring once every 100 years, so where are they all? And if you count people the right way, and not the scientific way, somehow, it comes down to just 2 people some 6,000 + years ago. General junk like that.

Which proved that not only did she not think of any of this stuff herself, she didn’t understand most of what she read in the first place.

After I had deciphered the “arguments” I went to the science. Most of the really good and big ones just have an archive of these silly assertions and a scientific proof to explain the errors.  (Talk Origins is great for this by the by should you get asked one of these “yeah so, explain this” questions).

Some of you may recall that there was a thing that ran around Facebook a few weeks ago about a test given to grade schoolers about “science” and most thought it a joke, until the school system (a Christian school) fessed up and said it was theirs. Anyway, at the end, was a question which tells you that this is all about indoctrination and not about actual science. The question was “And what do we say when people tell us that the earth is millions of years old?”

The answer is “Were you there?” Yeah that’s what crazy fundie parents are teaching our children to say in response to a scientific fact. And lo and behold that question also exists on the Talk Origins “creationist arguments”.

I found every single one of the lady’s “arguments” on Talk Origins. They are simplistic and easily dispelled. The offerer of course doesn’t understand a thing about what they just regurgitated. They aren’t meant to. They are happy to find somebody who agrees with them, who writes in a way that sounds all scientific-y, and is not understandable by them certainly. (This makes it likely to be true).

I cited scientific responses and the appropriate links to read the truth in full. (By the way NCSE is another great site for scientific responses and information on evolution and climate change).  Of course there was no response from the creation lady.

When I asked for her sources, since her arguments were not hers but something she admittedly read in a book, I got the stonewall. “You won’t read them anyway!” she whined. No of course I’m not going to line the pockets of a charlatan, but I will look up his name and read reviews of his book(s) and alert others where to go to read about his credentials.

But she won’t give them to me. Plagiarism is a darn sight less dangerous in her eyes than giving her sources up to scrutiny by others.

Truth is scary stuff to some.

I suppose next she will be telling me that Revelation is all about the Catholic Church being the beast. That seems to be the level where those of her kind end up.

What does all this mean?

Not much. It is just that willful ignorance of this sort is that voice that I hear that tells me that these folks shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and definitely not raise children. They should be set down on farms far away from normal people where they can engage in their fantasies without harming others.

But then that conflicts with the other voice that tells me that I don’t approve of limits to who can vote (heck given their level of duh, I figure we couldn’t go too wrong with letting chimps vote either), and I don’t think we want to go down the road of who can procreate either.

The nice thing is that the two voices conflict and I have to resolve the dilemma, something the fundie mind can avoid. So far I come down on the side of freedom, but if these people don’t stop annoying me with their nonsense, well, I might be persuaded to at least make chocolate unavailable to them. I mean it’s a treat they should be denied, just for being so darn goofy.