Yer Heathen Laws

Today he shall be lifted up and tomorrow he shall not be found, because he is returned into his dust, and his thought is come to nothing.

-1 Macabees 2:63 -

It's no surprise that the nattering nabobs of nullification and true haters of the secular Constitution  are resisting the Supreme Court's latest ruling forbidding the Confederacy to ban some marriages on Christian grounds. I'm talking about Texas, but the Lone Star State is hardly alone.  It's a "lawless ruling" says Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and if clerks are fined for refusing to issue marriage licences, he will defend them in court.  Like many a snake of fable, he doesn't have a leg to stand on.

"God don't want me to obey yer heathen laws!"  I can't wait for that defense to show up in Federal Court, and just try to wrap your mind around that convoluted logic,  Not that it would be the first time we've heard it and who could be surprised if we don't start to hear that toothless old Rebel Yell again.
Mississippi, Attorney General Jim Hood says gay marriage won't be legal in the state until the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals gives the go-ahead. A court of Appeals? And here we thought the Supreme Court had the final say.

Bobby Jindal tells his constituents:

"I think it is wrong for the federal government to force Christian individuals, businesses, pastors, churches to participate in wedding ceremonies that violate our sincerely held religious beliefs, We have to stand up and fight for religious liberty. That's where this fight is going,"

That "fight" is going precisely nowhere of course since the government isn't forcing any church or Pastor or Priest or anyone else to do anything, and a county clerk is free to resign if he doesn't like his job, just as any Muslim, Jew or Hindu can decide not to work for McDonalds if he won't serve pork or beef.   Anyway I suspect "Fightin' Bobby" would look real good in his Rebel grey uniform fightin' for the Ol' South. I think the irony could be measured on the Richter Scale.

Those of us of a certain vintage will remember when these God forsaken blowhards made the same arguments about interracial marriage and racial integration as well, and George Wallace based a presidential candidacy on undoing integration, " 'cause God don't want the races to mix."  Then as now, their miserable religious rage and sexual obsession  has come to nothing, leaving them to thrash around like a catfish on a sandbank . That pleases me no end and when they complain that it's a violation of  our "Freedom"  for the state not to be controlled by some state-sanctioned religious doctrine, I'm more than amused to watch these stinking turds of history slowly swirling down the porcelain bowl of justice. 

From Rome to Rubio, The Last Crusade

Let's be clear, when politicians like Marco Rubio talk about a danger to the survival of Christianity, they're not talking about survival or about Christianity, they're talking about a danger to the power and authority of a certain definition of Christianity that many Christians would call by a different name. Whether or not he seriously thinks Christianity will die out, that nobody will or could be a Christian if the US allows people of the same sex to be party to a civil marriage contract, Rubio, as most politicians do, is using words in a consciously deceptive way.

How do we define, or more importantly how does the government define Christianity?  In fact the constitution forbids it to do so . There are and have been many such claimants to the robe and sandals and the reins of government, so Marco is surely being less than honest to refer to Christianity when he means his Church and its rules. He's being a damned liar by offering us fables about the origins of our laws or arguing from tradition.

Some people simply don't define Christianity as a secular authority primarily established to restrict the private sexual thought and behavior of all people. Certainly not since they never legitimately had such power, nor does the American Constitution state or imply that any legitimate power be given such authority, nor is or government empowered or obliged to "save" any religion, tradition or religious practice.

There is no unified, undisputed definition of  Christianity or of any religion or the doctrines thereof and to say anything else is prevarication. If the legalization of an inherent right of Man is a blow to Christianity I would suggest that a weakening of Christian authority must have preceded it as is the case in Ireland where years of censorship, control of education, marriage rights, reproductive rights and lastly the widespread abuse of women and children, turned Christian power into a thing of public loathing and anger. Indeed Democracy and the right to elect a government only succeeded after the Church lost the power to prevent it.

Rubio, like many of his Evangelical allies are consciously taking the risky position of posing what people approve or see as a right to be protected, as being the enemy of their tribal authority.  He needs to remember how all the other shibboleths have fallen, interracial marriage, blue laws, censorship, the inferiority of women and indeed slavery -- and fallen despite claims that Christianity was in jeopardy and God would punish us all for allowing it.  Sooner or later the prophet has to deliver or be swept away. It's not a good thing to be in power when the argument from tradition, the argument from authority is stretched so far that it snaps.

No, Christianity in some form or another will survive. Perhaps a kinder, gentler more respectful form. It's Marco Rubio and the various crusaders against the right of the people to decide their own rights who are at risk.  I truly doubt that Rubio isn't aware of the truth of that, or that he is unaware of  the kind of  State toward which the manifest destiny of free people inexorably  trends.  It's a shortsighted lust for power and with all his dishonest nonsense about Christian tradition, that tradition has never been about freedom of conscience or any kind of liberty.

As with his mumblings about how our Cuba policies have not failed after 50 years, it's a defense of blind, intransigent, self justifying power and authority and an attack on objectivity and the liberty of the citizen. Make no mistake, Rubio is against the idea that the government is of the people, by the people and for the people and legitimized only by the people and not by gods or politicians who pretend to speak for them.

One gets the idea that Pope Francis is well aware of all this and is concerned that Rubio's way of thinking is making the Church not only irrelevant, but unsustainable in the modern world, but as the Chinese were wont to say from ancient times, "Heaven is high and the Emperor is far away.". The Vatican has one policy, the parish priest and the pandering politician have another. Down at the level where the rhetoric hits the road it's still the old beast.

Christianity has survived a great deal  as it always has -- and it will change a great deal as it always has.  If anything is in danger, it's the guy staking everything on holding back the tide.

Sex lives of the rich and hypocritical

You might think that a person's sex life should be their own business. On the other hand, if you're like me, you might also think that, since Rick Santorum believes that he has the right to shove the government straight up every woman's vagina, then his own "love" life would be open season. So, just for fun, let's look at some of those pesky things they call "facts."

Fact 1: Rick Santorum married the former Karen Garver in 1990, and they have seven children (eight, if you count pickled Baby Gabriel).

Fact 2: Ricky has publically stated that he is completely opposed to all forms of contraception, and that sex should only be for procreation.



(Sadly, the original publishers, CaffeinatedThoughts.com, an evangelical Christian website, got a little cranky that people were taking chunks of their interview and showing what Santorum actually said, usually in context. So they make the usual "copyright infringement" argument every time somebody extracts a bit of it. Ironically, since they hosted it on Youtube, they can't hide it away without losing access themselves. Drag forward to 17:55 for this bit.)

One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea ... Many in the Christian faith have said, "Well, that's okay ... contraception's okay."

It's not okay because it's a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They're supposed to be within marriage, for purposes that are, yes, conjugal ... but also procreative. That's the perfect way that a sexual union should happen. We take any part of that out, we diminish the act. And if you can take one part out that's not for purposes of procreation, that's not one of the reasons, then you diminish this very special bond between men and women, so why can't you take other parts of that out?

And all of a sudden, it becomes deconstructed to the point where it's simply pleasure. And that's certainly a part of it—and it's an important part of it, don't get me wrong—but there's a lot of things we do for pleasure, and this is special, and it needs to be seen as special.

As Ms Santorum is barely out of her 40s, there is no reason to assume that she's gone through menopause, although it's always possible. Adding these facts together, we have to assume that the Santorums did not mate like mad minxes during the nearly six years of her life that Karen has spent pregnant, or for the brief period of any hypothetical menopause which she might or might not have experienced.

Therefore, I think that it's safe to assume that either Rick Santorum is completely hypocritical on the subject of birth control (always possible), or he and his wife have had sex between eight and twelve times total. Approximately once every two years.

You could fantasize that they make it special: a glass of wine, maybe some candles, with her in her most fetching flannel nightgown and him in nothing but a sweater vest.

But I suspect that that the dark deed is most likely performed with a minimum of foreplay, with the lights out, missionary style. I picture Ricky pumping away grimly, trying to finish as quickly as possible, before either of them starts to enjoy it. And when the vile depravity comes to an end, they both roll over and quietly sob themselves to sleep.

Intelligent Disdain

In Missouri and Indiana this month, bills have been put forward in the legislature to return "intelligent design" to the classrooms. Because their children are apparently not stupid enough yet.


I occasionally hang out on a blog called Stone the Preacher (it's run out of Hope Chapel in Hermosa Beach, CA); I ended up there rebutting one of the standard canards of the fundamentalists (I think it was "atheists have no morals," but at this late date, I'm really not sure), and I kept going back, probably because I thrive on conflict. And run-on sentences. And recently, Pastor Steve, a young-earth creationist, made the mistake of mentioning "intelligent design."

I've always loved that phrase because of its inherent idiocy. "Intelligent design" is creationism wearing glasses and a clown nose, and the adjective is so clearly in conflict with the noun that people should be unable to avoid stuttering when they say it. Every attempt to sneak it into schools gets thoroughly destroyed in the courts, but that doesn't stop them from trying over and over again (for example, in Missouri and Indiana - and probably in some other state any day now).

Let's be honest: evolution explains why some of the ridiculous design flaws exist in the world. There is no "intelligence" in the "design" of the world, and examples are everywhere. Comedians have been pointing them out for years.

"God is a mechanical engineer! Look at this marvelous collection of joints and levers!"

"No, God is an electrical engineer! Look at the intricacy of these neurons and synapses!"

"No," said the city planner, "God is obviously a civil engineer. Sometimes, when nobody's looking, it's just easier to run a sewer pipe through a recreational area."

But fundies, being fundies, keep soldiering on, like particularly pious zombies on a quest for children's brains.

Let's consider the evidence. And remember, the people who believe this silliness also believe that God doesn't make mistakes.

1. As we develop in the womb, we form three sets of kidneys. The pronephroi ("forekidneys") appear in the fourth week; they degenerate pretty quickly, but the ducts are recycled to build the mesonephroi ("midkidneys"). And then those degenerate and the tubules are recycled in the metanephroi ("hindkidneys"), which are our permanent kidneys.

This almost seems like an elegant bit of engineering, but really, it's more like building an Eiffel Tower as scaffolding for another Eiffel Tower, which is used as scaffolding for a final, bigger Eiffel Tower, and you rip down each one as you go (I don't remember where I saw that metaphor, but it's perfect). It's an unnecessarily complex process, and it's just evidence that evolution had a number of false starts along the way, and had to go back and refigure what it was building.

(On the subject of kidneys, why is the gene for polycystic kidney disease dominant? Why make it 50% likely that you'll inherit a painful, life-threatening condition?)

2. The female quoll (an Australian marsupial) has only six teats, but gives birth to a litter of 18, meaning that the 12 slowest or weakest die of starvation. A 66% death rate makes sense to you? Was God weeding out the weak ones? Why didn't He just build them right to begin with?

3. While you’re in Australia, look up the mystery of a kangaroo’s teeth, for that matter. The grasses they eat are tough, and wear down the front teeth of the 'roo. So, to make up for this, they evolved were designed with an unusual ability: as the front teeth wear down, they fall out and the back teeth move forward to replace them.

Which sounds great, except that they don't have the ability to grow new teeth. So by the time they're 15 or 20, they run out, and starve to death. Apparently, God hates kangaroos, and wants to see them suffer.

4. Birds of the family Sulidae (boobies and gannets)...

...heh, heh... I said "boobies"...

4. Birds of the family Sulidae are diving birds, plunging into the water from the sky. One of their adaptations to this is that they don’t have external nostrils – the water would get shoved up their noses on impact. But even without external nostrils, they have everything else that makes up a nasal airway inside their beaks. It’s just that the nostrils are sealed off at the outside. Having nasal airways that can’t work is pretty pointless design. Although evolution tells us why they’re there, it makes you wonder why God would choose to install a completely pointless structure inside the bird's beak. Did He build it from spare parts from another bird?

If these things, and so many others, are designed, that’s some pretty shoddy craftsmanship.

Maybe God occasionally gets drunk on sacramental wine while He's working?

That frothy mix

I have to assume that Rick Santorum is still in the race to be the GOP nominee because he hopes that some simultaneous outbreak of monkey pox will wipe out the rest of the field. That, or, as a good Catholic, he enjoys a little flagellation every so often - it's good for the soul.

He is probably the thirteenth or fourteenth least-electable candidate in the history of humanity, but we can't seem to get him to just shut the hell up and go away.

Even before the primary, Santorum was surging in Iowa (eeewww!) at 15%, but he still can't seem to consistently break 5% nationally. Not that he isn't optimistic (or possibly sadistic): he put it a few weeks ago, "I'm counting on the people of Iowa to catch fire for me." (Which seems unnecessarily cruel, but what do I know?)

The problem is that Santorum is just the latest flavor of not-Romney to hit the shelves. It's his turn to be touted nationally for the next few weeks, until somebody remembers that we're electing a president, not a pope.

Santorum has two major disabilities that are going to prevent his election: his sanctimonious, unpleasant nature, and his aggressively ignorant and regressive social policies. His entire platform, as far as I can tell, seems to be abortion and gay marriage - everything else is secondary. If he were, by some miracle, to be elected president, we'd have an uninterrupted 4-year fiesta of fag-punching.

We know that Santorum is so homophobic that he'll only eat a corndog with a knife and fork, but is he also racist? Well, that one's a little trickier. He has, for a long time, been consistently in favor of the full GOP stand on immigration: no amnesty for illegal immigrants, and likewise no benefits for them; deport criminals, strengthen border security, and even the somewhat trickier "English as the official language" stance. And while that has overtones of "scary brown people," it's the Republican party line. So no points there.

On the other hand, it's somewhat telling when you stand in front of a group of white people from Iowa (a redundant statement, but let's move on) and explained that "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."



His first explanation was that he didn't remember making the comment. Faced with the video, he huddled with his campaign, but the best they could come up with was that he "mumbled it... I was starting to say one word and I sort of came up with a different word and then moved on."

What he couldn't seem to explain was what that "one word" was. "Blaa" is a pretty unique sound. Who does he not want to help? Bloggers? Bluefin tuna? Blink 182?

Blacks?

But let's move beyond that. What would a Rick Santorum presidency do for America? Well, let's consider his belief system for just a moment. What does Rick Santorum believe in?

His career should have been over after he tried to make political points leading the charge in the Terry Schiavo case, exploiting the pain of the family of a provably brain-dead woman. But he weathered that (presumably, the $250 thousand he earned in campaign contributions from the Schiavo debacle helped a lot).

Rick Santorum believes that birth control is directly responsible for the moral decline of America, saying "the dangers of contraception in this country, the sexual liberty idea and many in the Christian faith have said, you know contraception is OK. It’s not OK because it’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

He wrote an article in 2002 blaming pedophilia in Catholic priests on "moral relativism" and "cultural liberalism."

This is a man who said that John McCain, who was tortured while a POW in Vietnam, "doesn't understand how enhanced interrogation works."

He tried to require the "No Child Left Behind" law to ensure that creationism was taught in schools.

In 2007, the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington named him one of the twenty most corrupt members of Congress.

Will Bunch, the senior writer and columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News has covered politics in Pennsylvania since shortly after Rick Santorum was elected for the first time. He wrote a fascinating article from a Philadelphian's point of view entitled "The Rick Santorum That America Doesn't Know." Take a few minutes and read it - it's worth your time.

But the worst thing I know about Rick Santorum is what happened when his wife Karen was 20 weeks pregnant. Her non-viable fetus was not expected to survive, and the mother developed an infection. And Rick Santorum, who is opposed to abortion for any reason, allowed the doctors to give his wife pitocin to speed the birth. And while that may have been wildly hypocritical, what followed was completely insane.

After spending the night with the dead fetus on the bed between them, they took the body home with them, and forced their children to cuddle with it and sing songs to it. Ms Santorum even proudly wrote a book about it.

Where the hell was Child Protective Services when this was going on? Where was the Health Department?

The worst thing that could possibly happen to America would be a Rick Santorum presidency: I wonder how long it would take him to appoint a Grand Inquisitor?

And yet, he is suddenly one of the two front-runners in the GOP field. Is the Republican Party so desperate to find an alternative, any alternative, to the robotic hair-helmet that is Mitt Romney that they're willing to embrace anyone at all?

Thought I'd say hi to Bradlee Dean

Since you can only send text in Dean's contact form, he isn't getting all the supporting links. Fortunately, I've got a hotmail account that I don't use for anything else. Because not only am I unlikely to get an answer to this, I suspect I'm about to be buried in religiospam.

Pastor Dean,

You know, it's a funny thing. I read your explanation of the controversy surrounding your prayer on the Minnesota House floor, and I'm a little confused.


I'll be honest. I never heard of you before. Maybe that's because I'm not from Minnesota. So there's that. But you're a man of God and everything, right?

You start the explanation by saying "Today I gave a prayer at the opening of the MN House session. Little did I know that I was going to be giving the prayer on the same day that they were going to have a vote on the marriage amendment." But apparently you had to push through the protestors to get into the building, and they were yelling and everything, and they were even there for two weeks already, protesting an issue that seems to be important to you.

So that doesn't sound like a very good explanation, but maybe you were just trying to say that you didn't know about that vote happening that day. I guess I can accept that. I want to be fair and give you the benefit of the doubt.

But then, your explanation of why you got struck from the record and Zellers denounced you and restarted the session with a different pastor giving a prayer and everything, was "Apparently someone was angry about my prayer because I invoked the name of Jesus." But that's not what anybody said at all.

I mean, if I understand the problem, the big thing was that you went up there and pretty much said that President Obama wasn't a Christian. You know, at the end of the prayer, when you were all like:

"I know this is a non-denominational prayer in this Chamber and it's not about the Baptists... or any other denomination, but rather the head of the denomination and His name is Jesus. As every President up until 2008 has acknowledged."

I think that was probably what the problem was. You seem kind of confused about that, so I hope this helps.

I mean, when Zellers, who asked you to come, denounced you, you said that "If Speaker Zellers does not stand for the Constitution, our veterans, the Founding Forefathers, and the Christian God to whom he swears by an oath to uphold these very things, then I would say Mr. Zellers is not fit to be the Speaker of the House of Representatives of Minnesota."

But that isn't what he said. You even wrote it out earlier, where Zellers said "He does not represent my values or the values of this state." He didn't say anything about the Constitution, or the Founding Fathers or God. You did.

But while I was reading that, I saw where you said that after you gave the prayer, "Before I knew it, instead of the media reporting on it as me standing up for our future generations, all of the sudden I became an anti-gay divisive pastor."

I don't think that was it, really. I mean, I watched the video, and then I read the transcript, and you didn't say anything about being gay. And since that couldn't have been why they said that, I had to go to the google.

And I don't think that you "all of the sudden became the anti-gay divisive pastor." What I think happened was that people remembered when you said that gays should be arrested and jailed, or when you said that Muslims were more moral than American Christians because the Muslims say that gays ought to be killed. (I'm sorry, but that doesn't sound very moral to me, saying that somebody ought to be killed.)

And in that same show, where you said about gays "On average, they molest 117 people before they're found out." (Where'd you get that number, anyway?)

Or when your volunteers ask for donations to stop teen suicide and get them off drugs, but all your programs are anti-gay and anti-abortion: nobody seems to mention that part.

Or when you and that Bryan Fischer guy said that gays are like Nazis. Or when you said that a Congressman, who's sworn to uphold the Constitution, is trying to bring it down and put in sharia law, and he's doing this by protecting gays from hate crimes.

See, when you say things like that, maybe you should check out what the media says about you each of those times. Because I'm thinking that maybe it wasn't "all of a sudden." I'm thinking that you've been called anti-gay and divisive way before now. And probably a lot of worse names.

Lemmings

Well, it's a new week. Apparently the world ended on Saturday not with a bang, but with a whimper. If you're reading this, you're apparently a hopeless sinner, doomed to five months or so of torment before being sent to the fiery pits of hell, or perhaps (just maybe) Harold Camping was wrong.

Christianity tends to get a pass in our society. The most outrageous ideas popping out of the mouths of the sincerely religious are allowed to stand unchallenged (although other religions don't get the same respect).

But not this time, really. Most of us heard about Camping and his idiotic ideas, and most of us thought he was an idiot. But there were some poor gullible bastards who were taken in. Many of them were taken in completely.

A man in Nairobi killed himself because of Camping's prediction. A man in California tried to euthanize his pets. People have spent their life savings, families were torn apart.

And a woman in Antelope Valley tried to kill herself and her two daughters, by slitting their throats and wrists.

Fortunately, "murder/suicide" now joins "spotting fraud" as just another thing she sucked at.

Some people suggested that Camping had emailed a suicide note to the Family Radio employees and killed himself. Sadly, that didn't prove to be the case. He showed up the next day, confused that he'd proven to be a lying sack of fuck. As I write this, the Family Radio website hasn't changed their "Judgement Day - May 21, 2011" screen:

But I clicked on that microphone in the upper right, and that vicious, unwavering bastard is holding a press conference claiming that God has now judged the world, and it will still end on October 21st.

This evil fucknozzle has earned over a hundred million dollars with this scam, and he is still trying to keep it going.

The saddest part to all this is, Camping's followers will most likely just become more devout because of this. What needs to happen is that his victims need to sue him for his immoral con game. But it won't happen.

Because the one thing that lasts forever is stupidity.

"Those who wait on the Lord will soar on wings like eagles, and they will run and not be weary, and they will walk and not faint."

I don't have to look for evidence that the United States of America isn't united, unless you consider enraged confusion to be a uniting factor. A Pew polling report last year showed that only 34 percent of Americans think Obama is a Christian. I have no idea how many Americans like me, don't give a damn if he's a Zoroastrian as long as he keeps his scriptures under his pillow and not under mine. His religion or lack thereof is no more significant to me than his favorite basketball team and indeed the private beliefs of most of our better presidents have rarely been a factor in their official lives.

Of course those who wish to destabilize and polarize what's left of the informed electorate for reasons of partisan gain are happy to make an issue of it and for them it's indeed a game with few rules and only one strategy: attack, attack, attack. Prominent amongst that breed of snakes is of course, Fox News, who can depend on a base of religious chauvinists and racist bigots who know less about the certainties they profess than their enthusiasm might indicate.

Take the recently manufactured "scandal" about the inaccuracy of Obama's reading of Isaiah 40:31 at the National Prayer Breakfast this week. Fox Followers can't really be expected to know much about the archaeological history of Isaiah, the variations between extant scrolls or that chapters 40 - 66 seem to have been written about two centuries after Isaiah himself, but apparently they have so little regard for the knowledge of America's scholarship that they also don't expect us to remember that there are other and better translations than the King James version, some of which have incorporated what has been found at Qumran and most of all: that the original certainly isn't in English. President Obama was simply quoting the very popular New International Version. Some scandal.

One can hope that these fragments scraped from the bottom of the GOP slime barrel, indicate that the barrel is empty. Sad to say, it's very easy to make a fool of one's self in America, but it's still difficult to get Americans to notice it amidst the sound and fury.

The Ten Commandments? Again?

Over in Texas, yet another legislator wants to find a way to sneak the Ten Commandments into public buildings. This time, they're using the "foot in the door" theory of governance: this bill will "protect public school teachers who have chosen to have the Ten Commandments displayed in their classrooms" by claiming it's a "patriotic exercise," not a religious one. (Just proving he doesn't understand either history or religion.)

In Florida, the mayor of Cape Coral thought that posting the Ten Commandments in City Hall was a spiffy idea, but the City Council didn't agree.

This comes up at least a couple of times a year, as some thoughtless theocrat tries to commit religious bukkake and squirt his personal theology in the faces of everybody around them.

Let's start, of course, with the fact that this act is automatically exclusionary. Even past the objections of the irreligious (you know, the people who might not want their tax money spent on somebody else's silly damned belief system), what about the folks who actually believe in this stuff? Whose version of the Decalogue are you going to post up there?

The Ten Commandments are normally pulled from Exodus 20:2–17 (which is mirrored in Deuteronomy 5:6–21). And despite the customary image of the two stones, in neither book is there a neat, tidy set of ten bullet statements, so different religions split things up differently.

The best example, of course, is the first three Commandments, which are widely variable. Reading from Exodus, we take the following verses:

I am the LORD thy God... Thou shalt have no other gods before me... Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image... (nor) bow down thyself to them, nor serve them

(As always, we'll be sticking with King James version. Because, you know, "breathed out by God" and all... but mostly because I like the poetry of the language.)

Now, if you happen to be Jewish, "I am the Lord thy God," all by itself, is the First Commandment. Most Protestants, on the other hand, essentially treat that as a preface to the actual list, while the Orthodox sects fold it into the "no other gods" part; Catholics and Lutherans, meanwhile, slam the whole thing together into one big lumpy First Commandment.

This means, of course, that the Third Commandment is "Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain." Unless you're Catholic (or again, Lutheran), who believe that's the Second Commandment.

And this one-off numbering continues on down the list until you get to those pesky "covets," which most of the God-swallowers lump together.

Except, of course, the followers of the Pope or Martin Luther, who split off the first "covet" and have their own personal Ninth Commandment. Where everybody else just pretty much says "don't covet anything," the Catholics and Lutherans figure that not coveting another man's wife needs its own place in the list, separate from more mundane covetousness, such as the ass.

As for coveting the wife's ass, they don't like to talk about that. (Ba-dum ching! Thank you! I'll be here all week!)

So, in posting the Ten Commandments, which religion do you honor over the rest? The Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant? (We'll ignore the Lutherans this time; they're just following in their trouble-making founder's footsteps.)

But just for fun, let's consider the Ten Commandments (all three versions) themselves.

I am the LORD thy God... Thou shalt have none other gods before me... for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God...

Do you notice that God doesn’t say that there ARE no other gods? Just that you shouldn’t worship them, because He doesn’t appreciate the competition. I’ve always thought that was interesting.

But then we get to Deuteronomy 5:8-9: Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them...

Kind of puts art out of reach of the common man, doesn’t it? It’s only later translations of that verse that change "graven images" to "idols" – the original Hebrew doesn’t have any "sacred" subtext attached to the word for graven image (pecel). Since the two statements are seperable (“Make no graven images” and “bow down and worship them”), it makes one wonder what God thought of Michelangelo.

In fact, this same prohibition, sans the "bowing down" bit, is echoed earlier in the same book (Deu 4:23-25).

Further along, we come to this: Keep the sabbath day to sanctify it, as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee. Six days thou shalt labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou. (Deu 5:12-14)

A strict reading of that would indicate that taking Saturday off is in opposition to the Word of God. He's telling you to work for six days, not just five.

Which also brings us to the fact that the Sabbath is supposed to be on the last day of the week, not the first – but that goes back to the antisemitism of the Council of Laodicea: Christians must not judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day, rather honouring the Lord’s Day; and, if they can, resting then as Christians. But if any shall be found to be judaizers, let them be anathema from Christ.

Makes you wonder about the people who claim that "the Ten Commandments are the source of the American legal system!" Yeah, not so much.

Basically, even if you include perjury (which doesn't always qualify), there are only three Commandments that count as laws (the other two being murder and theft). Three out of ten; 30% isn't a passing grade on any test I've ever taken.

Taking God's name in vain? Sorry, freedom of speech.

Adultery? Hardly a crime; practically a way of life in some places.

Honoring fathers and mothers? Well, we try, but they keep trying to tear down Social Security.

And you really can't ban coveting. Wanting something better is the driving force of capitalism, after all.

So how important are these ten little rules again?
______________

Update (10/19/10): It has been pointed out that the choice of which day should be the Sabbath was covered in tbe New Testament.

Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days... (Col 2:16, ignoring that whole "jot and tittle" argument)

A statement that was, of course, ignored until the 4th Century, when the Council of Laodicea got all post-Jewry on their asses. But there it is.

Your media narrative is going to kill us all

In case you've been living in a cave for the past several months, Terry Jones, relatively unknown pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center and Yosemite Sam impersonator, burst onto the world stage by threatening to burn Qu'rans on 9/11. Well, now he's cancelled that event, although he isn't clear on the reason: at first, he said he'd cancel if plans to build Park51 were scrapped, or perhaps if he got a call from the president.

Despite that, it seemed only fair to call it off, since he was told that this was a bad idea by pretty much everybody in the world, from both sides of every political and religious spectrum: from President Barack Obama to professional quitter and loudmouth Sarah Palin, to the Prime Minister of Canada; from every possible Islamic organization, to a major group of atheists and free-thinkers, to the National Association of Evangelicals and even the fucking Vatican.

The thing is, this wasn't something that should ever have been seen in the national news. This self-important pastor was a self-aggrandizing lunatic, known to create potentially newsworthy controversy, simply to increase his own notoriety. There were only fifty people in his congregation! How did he become an international headline?

It was the media who felt that his voice should be amplified, to be heard by the entire world. Terry Jones should have been ignored, except that "news" organizations, desperate for ratings, saw conflict in his story. Had he been simply overlooked, like some random racist screaming "nigger," he would have faded away as nothing more than a blip on the world radar screen.

(In a rational world, you could even ask why the burning of a group of bound pages would make anyone angry. Then again, ask PZ Myers why the "desecration" of the Eucharist would cause death threats and controversy. So we'll just take that argument as a given.)

Of course, as each voice spoke out to tell him he was wrong, Jones gained power. The President of the United States should have had nothing to say about some minor ruckus involving a redneck Florida lunatic with a bad mustache. But, by exaggerating Jones's profile, the media forced Obama's hand. (And god knows Obama seems more than willing to jump in whatever direction the media is pointing this week.)

Really, with every word Jones spewed out onto the public scene, this jumped-up Florida firebrand proved that he didn't even care about his own religion, much less the random mythology of the Middle East.

After all, he'd been denied a permit to burn anything. In order to perform his ignorant display of bigotry, Jones would have to break the law. And, just for giggles, what does the Bible say about that?

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. (Romans 13:1-2 NIV)

Of course, if you're going to be rude enough to go to the Scripture, you should also consider words from earlier in that same book.

Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. And we know that the judgment of God rightly falls upon those who practice such things. (Romans 2:1-2 NIV)

But it hardly mattered that Jones was a crappy Christian; he reflected the media's narrative about the "holy war" between Islam and the western world. And even better, this was a new slant - instead of a radical imam screaming "Death to America!" this was a radical priest screaming "Death to Islam!" (Sadly, a philosophy echoed far too often these days).

So the news networks gave Terry Jones his unjustified fifteen minutes.

In the end, the problem is simple. Radical adherents to any religion are dangerous. They don't need to have their voices heard - they need to be ignored. If Terry Jones hadn't been elevated to an international stage, he would have been considered a random lunatic with a minor cult following him. Instead of a flashpoint inciting riots.

But sadly, because of the current, violently partisan political scene, where the most insane people are considered newsworthy, there's a good chance it will happen again.

The best option? A counter-protest. But a relatively peaceful one (emphasis on the "relatively"). Terry Jones wanted headlines for burning the Qu'ran, and he got them.

So, with the news media in full force, you have to wonder what the reaction have been if he was met by a small group of people with no weapons and no combative attitude. Just fire extinguishers.

People willing to spray down everybody in the neighborhood with non-toxic white foam.

Sure. There would have been some danger - these aren't just idiots, they're armed idiots. But sometimes, your only choice is to change the narrative.

It's just a thought.

Masturbation, Mutilation and Tea

Apparently, my feelings about the Tea Party are very funny over in Trollhattan, because I'm regularly accused of stupidity and dishonesty and the entire list of standard calumnies when I mention the evidence of insanity in the house of Tea. "Proof" is the usual demand of the rightly accused and of course there's never proof of insanity; but not only do most people know it when they see it, they also know the preponderance of evidence when they're drowning in it.

Take Christine O'Donnell -- please. Masturbation, says the Delaware Tea Party Express candidate soon to appear on primary election ballots, is the same as adultery and as "proof" she offers the Bible. Yes, the same book that tells us that a cheeseburger is an abomination and damnation results from using cotton thread to sew a linen shirt.

"the Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can't masturbate without lust."

Of course when she says "the Bible" she's referring to a Gospel and it's inclusion under the biblical rubric is a matter of dispute and a matter in which proof has no place. It's also a document which, like the Koran, has no legal status in our country, yet she rolls on with rapturous certainty:

"When a married person uses pornography, or is unfaithful, it compromises not just his (or her) purity, but also compromises the spouse's purity. As a church, we need to teach a higher standard than abstinence"

she told MTV, some years ago. Of course we're a secular Republic and not a church, but can you think of something of a "higher standard" than abstinence that doesn't include genital mutilation? I can't, but one does not expect the words of a Tea Party candidate to mean what they say any more than one expects Biblical cosmology to reflect reality.

One does expect however that when one refuses to list one's place of residence while running for Representative, using the excuse that her house was broken into, when in fact it wasn't, one will be called a liar as well as a nutjob. Please feel free to do so with my blessing.

Again, I'm sure I'll be called names and "proof" will be demanded. I'm sure I need not remind you that it's the guilty party that demands proof of their guilt, while the innocent often has more faith in the evidence. If there are more nuts in that misbegotten party than in the fruit cake you threw away last Christmas, perhaps this will serve as one more chewy bit of that evidence.

Life is not a Rolex - a Rolex is not alive

"Comprehensible to the intelligent, to the world at large, needing interpretation"

-Pindar-
___________________________

Ah, Pastor Rick Warren -- not quite smart enough to realize that his arguments have long since been steamrollered by better minds or just smart enough to realize that enough people are ignorant of it for him to make a living by peddling delusion? That is the question.

Put Rick on the list of people deeply disturbed by a sign on a bus saying belief in invisible magic spirits isn't necessary if you want to be good to your fellow humans. In fact he's been in terror of disbelief for a long time, resorting often to such idiocies as the idea that Atheists must be wrong because they're angry, that Atheists are responsible for most of the worlds wars and atrocities including being responsible for the Spanish Inquisition. I have to admit, even I didn't expect that.

No, it's ridiculous not to believe in magic and the supernatural and forces and places for which there is no evidence other than the failure to understand nature. You see, if Pastor Warren is walking down a mountain and finds a rock - that could be accidental, but if he finds a Rolex, it's "design."

Again, it's easily comprehensible to the rare intelligent American that Rolex's do not occur in nature,nor are they alive and self reproducing, but things, like living cells and viruses can indeed result from natural processes which is liberally illustrated by evidence and that Warren is trotting out this mawkish and moronic argument only because, as I said, there are enough congenitally and willfully stupid people out there to be blind to his festival of fatuous fallacies. It's not an argument at all really, it's just a bad analogy and an attempt to shift the burden of proof as Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker illustrates with greater patience and a good deal more skill than I have.

Warren doesn't have enough faith to be an atheist, he says in an attempt to make science and evidence and logic and knowledge a false equivalent of ignorance and the will to believe. Again, if you're intelligent, nobody has to explain it to you any more than I would have to explain why, contrary to his lies belief, same sex marriage is not just like pedophilia and neither Tomas de Torquemada nor the Holy Office at the Vatican were atheists.

But almost everybody believes in the supernatural he says, bringing the ad populum fallacy up to bat. "The actual number of secularists in the world is actually quite small outside of Europe and Manhattan," he continues, adding an appeal to people who find an educated populace threatening. The place for Secular Humanists is North Korea, whines Warren. It's called "poisoning the well" for anyone interested and yes, it's in any book of popular fallacies. That he doesn't tell us that the place for blind faith in religious authority is in the Taliban, isn't surprising, but it is telling.

Of course if the future of the world is not secularism but as he reminds us: pluralism, a certainty that certainly lacks support as we see beliefs declining as education ( and intelligence) increases, it's hard to understand that we should accept a multiplicity of religions but not Secular Humanism. What then does Humanism lack that theistic religion has? Authority. It's rather hard to base a tyranny or any system of arbitrary authority on it and that, dear reader, is what Rick Warren is all about and that's why he's afraid and that's why he has to make fun of your freedom.