Friday, May 3, 2013

Godnuttery

There are times I think that a society with too much religion is like a society that leaves loaded guns all over for kids and idiots and lunatics to create mayhem with.  Our founding fathers may even have thought it was worse but certainly, following the story of a five year old killing his two year old sibling with a rifle casually left in the corner with a story of a physically more adult Godnut blaming Hitler's atrocities on the European Age of Reason has to make one take notice. 

Yes, reason is the enemy if you're a Godnut. Martin Luther is famous for calling reason "that damned whore" and he may have had as much to do with the violent, murderous anti-Semitism as the Roman Catholic Church he rebelled against.  It's hard for an honest person to ignore this and blame irrational and murderous hatred in countries like Germany on Vernunft or Reason.  No, Reason isn't the whore, she's the one telling you to stay out of the whorehouse.

But all things are possible with God, more indeed than are possible with automatic weapons and together -- well, watch out.

For irrational Godridden harpies like Penny Nance, CEO of the Christian activist group Concerned Women for America  is the kind of Rasputinoid advisor Fox News and people like to dress up and present to the public as though the stench of the charnel pit didn't pervade every phrase, the problem today is too much reason, too much science, too much empiricism lurking behind our decisions and behind the way we treat our fellow humans. Instead we ought to be concerned with what peremptory proclamations religious leaders make.   You see, all's fair in the war on reason, on a rational view of morality, on science, on honesty, on decency itself because it challenges the right of that scaly ecclesiastical abomination with its bowels full of god to squat on civilization like a defecating toad.

When Charlotte, NC Mayor, Anthony Foxx proclaimed a day of reason as well as a day of prayer, he was advocating moral relativism, says Ms. Nance with dubious authority, which is what the Vermin of the Lord call any view of human behavior not taken from their ever shifting and baseless Biblico/Political cesspool.

"You know, the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust… Dark periods of history is what we arrive at when we leave God out of the equation.”

And yes, the Dark Ages and the Inquisition were a paradise compared to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, weren't they?  And God's hand, God's lash, God's glowing poker, God's swords and God's executioners and torturers and immolators of the innocent.  Liar, liar, liar. Democracy itself could only have arisen with the forced  removal of religious authority and its racks and stakes and dungeons and exterminations, and that rise was fought with hellfire and sulfur and gunpowder. Be morally certain -- absolutely certain of this: Penny Nance is not a friend of  the facts, nor is she advocating freedom or Democracy. She's not -- and by putting her cosmetically plastered, meretriciously dressed and coiffed self on the air, neither is Fox News.  Penny Nance and the carrion eating fly larvae that constitute Concerned Women for America and the hidden obsceneties who finance her thrive on the corruption and dissolution of virtually all that is good and honest and humane -- all that all the generations before us have fought and died for and dreamed of creating for their descendants and my hefty vocabulary of obscenity and blasphemy aren't adequate to the kind of malediction they deserve. Odiamus te, maledicimus te, et blashpemamus Nomen tuum in seculum, et in seculum seculi, Amen.

“You know, G. K. Chesterton said that the Doctrine of Original Sin is the only one which we have 3,000 years of empirical evidence to back up. Clearly, we need faith as a component and it’s just silly for us to say otherwise.”

Empirical evidence!  Picture me as the radio reporter at the Hindenburg crash:  "Oh the dishonesty!"   Oh the obscenity, oh the insanity.  If there are 3,000 years of empirical evidence -- and there are and thousands more -- it screams that faith is the enemy and if Luther was right and reason is the greatest enemy of faith, then faith is the enemy of humanity.  That means you and me and the United States of America.

Would Fox have mocked Galileo and the host of others?  Presented "empirical evidence" of their base reason and objectivity? Would the Concerned Women have agreed with Luther that

"This fool [Copernicus] wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred scripture tells us  that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth."  -- Martin Luther, "Works," 

Of course, and every philosopher from Bentham, Locke, Hume -- silly Einstein to ludicrous Feynman to risible Heisenberg and they still persist in pumping the proudly ignorant and  imbecile audience with lies and deceptions and breathing vampirical life into some obscene homunculus made from shit and calling it 'empirical evidence.'

And yet, who was it that introduced moral relativism to antique Christianity?  Didn't Paul "set us free" from absolutist moral law anyway?  Wasn't it Jesus who opined about refraining from absolute judgement?

Look, these gods, these idols, these human voices chanting from hollow scrolls have slaughtered and oppressed more people than crooks and madmen with guns alone and it's time we recognize it while there's time to save our culture and way of life. 

9 comments:

  1. G. K. Chesterton's 3000 years-
    The people of the Old Testament, the Jews, do not believe in original sin: knock off 1800 years of 'empirical evidence'. St. Paul invented it and Augustine polished the concept.
    Evidence?

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  2. No, Original Sin isn't a Jewish thing, nor is the inability of the deity to forgive it without having to create a half breed son and have him killed. It's one of the things that puzzles Jews about the Christians. Why can't God just forgive your transgressions? Can't be answered any more than anyone can show why God likes you to kill animals and burn them for no damn reason.

    It's hard to imagine what evidence there is of sin. Sin isn't crime, it's something offensive to the gods. So one would have to prove a god with specific attitudes and attributes first. It can't be done. The idea depends on there being an original human as well and you'd have to prove his identity and the date of his coming into existence. But trying to treat any of this as though it had the slightest grounding in reality is a fool's game because proof positive -- irrefutable, overwhelming truth is so easily ignored by the holy-rolling rubes, patsies, marks and other victims of the oldest profession.

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    1. Apparently mysticism is more interesting than reason?

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    2. That's what mystifies me. Reality is so magnificent and awe inspiring yet we pretend it's all about this fleeting moment in endless time on this infinitesimaly minute bit of matter. Really, was this infinitely complex universe created by an anthropoid deity whose main concern is our sex lives and what we believe about a myth?

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  3. I don’t knock all religions, all persons of faith, or all mystical experience; but these are shared resentments:

    Authoritarian Godbots telling me: What to think, what to feel, how to live, how to eat, what to read; with whom I can schtup and how to schtup and when to schtup; their disrespect of and intolerance towards my beliefs and my choices in life – including my choices at the voting booth; their revisionist histories and anti-intellectual attitudes; their defamations and deceits; that every aspect of my private life is open to public scrutiny – specifically, their scrutiny. Not all persons of faith are born-again Inquisitors; but all Inquisitors, it seems, are abusers of faith. Most of all, I hate it when Bible-thumpers get my face…

    By the authority invested in me by the great and almighty Cthulhu, I say we should smite those suckers.

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    1. Well said (O)CT(O)PUS, and, most assuredly do I agree.

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    2. Oh, I do and because religion does not exist without people and I think people are prisoners of their biology as social animals with all the instincts that entails. Religion is the ugliness, the pettiness, the cowardice and the urge to grovel to authority and the yearning for acceptance by authority which is innate in our species.

      No religion is any better than people and people? Well, see above. Keeping a religion is like keeping a pet tiger. sooner or later it will turn on you.

      Religion is all about conformity and the desire to enforce conformity. Religion is almost always at odds with the idea of progress and seeks a return to a usually imagined state. It is almost always intolerant toward the idea that knowledge can increase if that knowledge conflicts with the imagined state. These things seem to pertain without regard to the religion's imagined scenarios or gods or mythologized histories and if at a particular time a religion is not hostile, territorial and absolutist, under the right circumstances it, or sufficient members of it will become so. There have been Buddhist terrorists.

      I use the word members because religions are tribal to the extent that humans are tribal and tribes are the essential component of tribal warfare as every chimpanzee knows. How much of the Tanach is about not tolerating other tribes and their religions? Almost all of it.

      Our tribal instincts are almost impossible to eradicate even temporarily and so we're stuck with needing to create the nonsense we create so that we can be exploited and controlled and kept in hostile opposition to other tribes.

      The difference between benign religions and malignant religions is, in my opinion only a matter of time and circumstance.

      When Voltaire said "If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him" he spoke a mouthful. He does not and it has been because that's what nature makes us do and thus we do not rise above nature, we do not progress no matter how much further we see and understand. Progress itself is anathema to religion since it always takes us away from belief and the willingness to believe -- and because religion, like any parasite, must preserve its host.

      No, I'm not knocking wisdom and wisdom can accrete around religions like sand and shell fragments around a tube worm, but in contact with our belief instinct, even wisdom begins to arrogate to ultimate wisdom and being ultimate, one must not dare to progress from or away from it.

      Religion is evil in that it has the inescapable tendency toward, the ineluctible motivation to retard knowledge and freedom.

      "As long as humanity shall bend before an altar, humanity, the slave of kings and priests, will be condemned; as long as one man, in the name of God, shall receive the oath of another man, society will be founded on perjury; peace and love will be banished from among mortals."

      -Proudhon-

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    3. "There have been Buddhist terrorists."

      Can they do alterations, and where can I rent one?

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  4. Religion is the refuge of the weak minded and the charlatans who prey upon them. That there are some wonderful, thoughtful and graceful people who ARE religious is NOT sufficient excuse for its existence. There are wonderful, thoughtful and graceful non-believers who are not interested in slaughtering others who are not the same sort of non-believers that they are.

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