The day we celebrate

Of course the paper this morning contained the usual happy crap about celebrating FREEDOM as though we had either more of it or a better kind than Canada or most of Europe who have embraced the principles of Democracy and the rights of Man we seem to reject every Sunday as we yearn for the Divine right of Government.  What the day is about is political independence and independence from a government that denied us the right to Parliamentary representation it was legally obligated to provide while requiring us to identify the King's right to be king with a state church. It was about our right to fair representation as citizens, as equal participants in government regardless of wealth and importance and heredity and not about a tea tax.

As you watch the sound and fury of the fireworks, remember that the people selling themselves as patriots, the people talking about freedom in saccharine tones, really mean control by a powerful aristocracy allied with a narrow, sectarian interpretation of a certain religion.

"Blessed is the nation whose god is the Lord"  begins the full page full color newspaper insert payed for by the Hobby Lobby. It leaves off the next stanza: "the people he chose for his inheritance" which of course in that context means the Jews. It also mistranslates אשר־יהוה,  asher-Yaveh as the lord so those who think 'Jesus is Lord' will think it means them. The arrogance and the dishonesty would be amusing if the intent were not so insidious, because Our friends at Hobby Lobby, glowing like the face of Moses in their victory over secular law, have asserted their commitment to and aspiration toward a government Dei Gratia.  They assert their version of the Bible as the best source of normative morality.

The flag-bedecked page is packed with references to Supreme Court decisions from the 1830's supporting the public schools as the place to pray and teach Christianity and out-of-context quotes from the very anti-religious founding fathers like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson about the Christian Bible being the basis of all true morality. (No mention of course of the Bible backed, God tolerated institutions of wife beating and slavery and rape and genocide and banishment of non-Jewish people from holy land.)

No religion is about freedom, they are all about orthodoxy and uniformity of belief to the exclusion of other ideas and practices.  Freedom of worship is not freedom to enforce religious orthodoxy or religious law on others. No religion is about free choice, Democracy or the inherent rights of man.  No one in America has claimed the right to dictate your thoughts about divinity but religious organizations. Your prayers, your right to congregate and worship are guaranteed against the influence of  the Hobby Lobby and our constitution forbids our government to do what they insist is the right thing to do:  Establish and enforce  some form of Christian doctrine as the law of the land. If this be freedom, then freedom is slavery and the American Revolution against a divinely inspired Christian king we pretend to celebrate today was not only fought in vain, but was blasphemy and an unholy act.

Only for Christians

You can laugh a bit and console yourself that it doesn't matter all that much if an Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice tells us the first Amendment only applies to Christians -- maybe even if you are like me, not a Christian. It's only Alabama, right?

They didn't bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship, the Mayflower,

Justice Roy Moore announced to the mob at the Pastor for Life Luncheon. Maybe you'll remember that Jefferson owned one however and that he wasn't shy about warning us of religious tyranny. Maybe you'll remember Moore as the former justice who was removed from office for fighting to erect the Ten Commandments in the courthouse, but like that tumor you thought the chemo got rid of he came back two years later singing the same tune:

Let's get real. Let's learn our history. Let's stop playing games.

I would agree with that, but as we know, to the religious right, history is baked fresh every morning. The English colonists brought slaves, white and black, and Moore's ideological ancestors fought like hell to keep them, Bibles in hand.

Buddha didn't create us. Mohammad didn't create us. It's the god of the Holy Scriptures,

said Moore with the authority not granted him by anyone in particular, and grossly misrepresenting Jefferson and Madison and the U.S. Supreme Court with a stream of non sequitur he insisted that freedom of religion is only for Christians.

A newly-released video shows him expounding all this and worse in Jackson, Mississippi last January to a group called Pro-Life Mississippi. Of course it's hardly a game he's asking us to end, it's secular democracy, the pride of the age of Reason and Humanism, and like a stag at bay it's destined to be torn to ribbons and its head displayed on some courthouse wall. For nothing in our Constitution is as important, as hallowed by the blood of patriots, as the cracks, the loopholes, the weak spots that may just allow traitors and secessionist sons of the Confederacy to eviscerate it, hang it from its heels, bleed it and gut it like an animal to be sacrificed to his tyrannical, bloody-handed God.

The Liar's Crusade

Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

--Saint Augustine:  De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim --

______________________

Well you knew it was going to happen.  When it comes to a vessel big enough to contain the egos of the illiterate Biblical literalists, the world is not enough and if anything can expand, can inflate faster than the early universe, it's those very egos who insist we consider their idiotic, superstitious, fatuous and fact-free delusions to be reasonable alternatives to demonstrated and proven physical law.

Too bad that moronic mob of pretenders to received authority know as little about Christianity and its foundations as they know about nature as revealed in science and mathematics. Anything once rational and functional in early Christianity seems to have shed those attributes as vestigial organs, like the hip bones in a whale as an example of just how evolution works in all things.

There is nothing about the origin of species in the Fox TV series Cosmos that is without massive evidential support or that hasn't been thoroughly and repeatedly demonstrated in the fossil record and in the laboratory. The truth is that DNA based life forms not only can and do but must evolve over long periods of time into quite different life forms because of the mechanisms involved.  To argue otherwise is either dishonest or stupid or pathological.  Face it, only if one is staggeringly uninformed about basic physics and chemistry, geology and paleontology or mentally impaired and basically dishonest, is there any need to treat the fundamentals of science and mathematics as "opinions" that can honestly and reasonably be held by honest and reasonable people.

Few people would take the argument that because one can't come up with a final figure for Pi all numbers are so equally probable that I can't be mocked for saying it's 4 or worse. Would anyone honestly assert that I must be allowed in every classroom to insist that it's 4 because there's an old paleolithic legend I choose to delude myself with?  But it seems that there are more than a few who will, for many sinister and stupid reasons, tell you that facts are irrelevant and demand the right to interrupt your evening's entertainment and your offspring's education to demand respect for stupidity.

Danny Falkner, of Answers In Genesis showed up on the "Christ Centered" Janet Mefford Show  yesterday to accuse the Fox television series and its host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, of "marginalizing" those marginally rational and totally dishonest delusionals with "dissenting"  views on accepted scientific truths, reports Right Wing Watch. They say it's only fair to be allowed to refute the irrefutable -- and because they "believe" and belief is all they need to shut you up.

“Boy, but when you have so many scientists who simply do not accept Darwinian evolution, it seems to me that that might be something to throw in there, you know, the old, ‘some scientists say this, others disagree and think this,’ but that’s not even allowed,” 

Said Mefford, and presumably there were nodding heads all over the halls of idiocy and  cesspits of mendacity.   It's frightening to think someone can think of getting away with asserting that we have "so many scientists" and can't see the inherent contradiction.  (If you prefer unsupportable tradition over science, you're not a scientist)

So perhaps we have so many football fans who think the Seahawks lost the Superbowl, that the Sun orbits the flat Earth and Methusala lived 900 years. I have the right to interrupt anyone to assert this and for free.  May I demand the right to show up in any church on any Sunday to insist that there is no Yahweh, no El or Elohim, no trinity, no creation and never could have been?  That Jesus was nothing but another of many, failed anti-Roman zealots, that there is no heaven, no hell, no sin, no forgiveness, no resurrection -- no spirits, demons, angels and no souls?  Do I have the right to set up an altar to Zog in every Church, synagogue, Temple, Mosque and public school?

And why the hell not? 

Because it's not about fairness. It's not about honesty, it's certainly not about freedom of speech or of belief .  As Salmon Rushdie said of Fundamentalism: it's about power. It's about bringing untold trouble and sorrow, it's the idiot's crusade.

A&E downs the Duck

I didn't know who Phil Robertson was until just the other day when I stumbled upon A&E's Duck Dynasty and watched a bit before moving on. I had never watched the show, despite it's immense popularity, despite my fondness for shows about people who live in swamps, tiny towns and remote places -- People who hunt alligators, catch crawfish and run bait shops in towns like  Pierre Part  (the end of the world as the sign says) or Bayou Pigeon -- their cuisine, their music and culture, so quickly fading in an urbanizing country that still, as it always has, is forcing people into a cash economy, into paying jobs with regular hours while their environment - our country- is cut down, paved over and polluted. 

In general I'm comfortable with people who love the 'outdoors,' that odd term we call the actual environment of planet Earth -- people who own fishing gear, snake boots, snowshoes, canoes and all that and still prize the ability to use them in unspoiled country.   That's partially because such people are environmentalists although most will carefully explain that "they ain't no treehuggers or hippies."

That love of nature often sets them against entities like Florida's sugar cartel which has done more damage to our formerly vast wilderness than any terrorist could dream of,  so you'd think that the rapacious right would despise anyone who didn't support fracking, strip mining, clear-cutting, toxic waste dumping, smoke belching and generally destructive industry, and perhaps you'd expect to hear the voice of  the Right raised against such folks, but no.  The American Family Association is calling him a New American Hero, now that the network has suspended the release of next season's show.

Robertson likes to spend his time

"daydreaming about what he calls a “pristine earth”: a world where nothing gets in the way of nature or the hunters who lovingly maintain it. No cities. No buildings. No highways."  

says Drew Magary in a GC magazine interview.  But he also hates sinners and takes the Christian Bible as the standard of morality for the world, or at least the nastier parts favored by the Christian Right. That's where we part company. He's a gracious gentleman, says Magary and he doesn't like swearing or any of the other things Bible thumpers insist God doesn't like either, like people who don't subscribe to current, Christian Right sexual prohibitions.  Like the loathsome 'Reverend' Phelps's God, Robertson's god damns homosexuals and assorted other non-conformists.

“Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.” 

he says peremptorily and without regard to empiricism.  Fox News and the extremists in it's orbit  can hardly fail to come to his defense because impediments to religious authoritarianism attract them more than the Robertson's duck calls draw ducks to your blind.  Now of course anything Fox Condemns, anyone Sarah Palin supports ordinarily demands my opposition, but I have to ask myself, should a man be fired for expressing his opinions because we don't like them? 

That's not so easy to be sure about.  If Fox had fired someone for an opinion, for saying their position was "just wrong," I wouldn't hesitate to make it slime time for Fox, so I have to question Robertson's suspension.  After all, his opinion is that one never judges people but leaves it to God to sort out.  He believes in redemption as much as he believes that legal behavior that hurts no one can be "just wrong."

I have no way of knowing whether his contract with A&E stipulated that he make no controversial statements, no expostulations on his religious beliefs, but lacking that, I have to wonder about silencing people for "moral" reasons no matter who does it.   Certainly a network has the right to air or not to air any content, but it's not about the content of Duck Dynasty, but about the opinions expressed elsewhere.

 Some small voice still continues to ask me something the ACLU is asked all the time: are we attacking our own freedom when we curtail anyone's ability to say what "we just know" are ignorant, nasty and disgusting things?

 

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. 

Burn more gas for Jesus

It's hard to believe these people actually exist and harder to believe they've managed to worm their way into positions of respect and influence in America -- but that's the kind of country we are, babbling about the bible, scrawling godblather on the walls, rolling on the floor making gargling noises,  respecting and electing people who can't stop using God's names as toilet paper while shilling for the oil cartel.

Take the American Family Association, which in the right wing tradition has named itself innocuously with insidious intent; wrapping itself in God, Gospel and flag and having little to do with the American Family other than to deceive them and exploit their superstitions.

Take Bryan Fischer, the director of issues analysis for the AFA who, ostensibly in the interests of American families and their health and welfare, insists that the air isn't getting worse, the ice caps aren't melting at an ever accelerating rate and if we try to reduce our use of petroleum and coal, God will feel like a spoiled kid with a birthday present he doesn't like and probably, if we're lucky, sulk off to his room.  If we're not lucky of course, he'll send us more Katrinas and Sandys and earthquakes and floods and fires to burn us, our families and cuddly kittens to death -- amen.  So much for analyzing that issue, Bryan.  So much for the ironically titled "Conservatives" who see such vermin as allies and use their ravings to justify their rape and pillage of our liberty and our planet.

“You know, God has buried those treasures there because he loves to see us find them” 

said Fisher, who thinks you're stupid enough to think that some supreme being speaks through crooks and liars like him and hopes you'll go right out and buy an even bigger truck or two just to put a smile on God's face. Yes, Oil is God's little surprise and he'll just cry if you don't dig it up, burn it all as quickly as possible and poison us all by doing it.  If we don't do our part to end life on earth, how will all their twaddle about end times seem when it doesn't happen?

But of course, God doesn't give a shit what we do and we go on taking such people seriously and electing them and their representatives to public office and we go on railing and screeching at people who disagree and unfortunately none of them or us will be here in a hundred years or a thousand to defend ourselves when historians argue about how we let things get so bad -- how we let a rich and prosperous and free country turn into what I'm afraid it will become.

Rubio Slippers

Hey, I'm not a scientist, man,  says Florida's Republican Senator and neither am I, but then I'm not an imbecile nor like Marco Rubio, willing to prostitute that pale and slimy vestigial appendage which he calls his integrity for a few votes.  Integrity, that nasty noisome thing he uses like a mop to soak up the sticky, slimy, scummy votes from the peep-show floor of  Southern politics.

He's not a scientist, so how can we expect him to know that the entire universe wasn't created by a sentient entity called Yahweh in seven "days?"  Can we even expect him to ask why we can see further than 6000 light years if it's only 6000 years old?  No, he'd have to be a scientist, he says and even so, there are different theories, just as there are different theories about whether or not  the Earth is flat and the universe, as it says in the bible, has water above and below it and there's a layer a few hundred feet 'above' us where magic creatures live.

You'd have to be a scientist, and even then you'd be baffled by all the 'theories' that abound which although solidly bolstered by irrefutable evidence and buttressed with repeatable observation are -- only theories. 

“I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says.” 

I guess those would be parents of unsound mind or minds as lacking in scope and commitment to honesty as Marco's.  Honesty?  No, I'm not talking about the honesty that would require one to rank 'theories' according to their correspondence to the observation of nature, I'm talking about the dishonest assumption that parents are being prevented from telling their children that some god created us from a clot, a lump of clay or an ear of corn.  A polite person would call it hyperbole. I would call it a lie. I would see it as a continuation of the Republican libel and the war against modernity and science.

 The government has nothing to say about what you teach your kids, but it does have something to say about what I pay, what we pay to have them taught and face it, Rubio doesn't want them taught about 13 Mayan creator gods or Refafu, or Chuckwu or Osiris or Allah. He's simply trying to find support amongst the most ignorant, the deliberately stupid, the accidentally stupid and the demented. He's fishing for the Christian Creationists with fear as the bait. He's playing to the Christian Crusaders who want this to be a nation under God with an established religion.

There are signs that this brand of Christianism, this brand of Conservatism are weakening. Some see it in the entrails of this last election. There's evidence that blind belief is losing ground. That's what I want to believe, of course and that's why I'm not qualified to answer.

Tales of the Bizarro World

Remember Bizarro World, where everything is its opposite?  As Superman said, "If I win this crazy game, these Super-Creatures will say I lose"  Hit the ball over the fence and they'll call you out.

Somehow this has been the tactic behind Republican campaigns since that great Victim, elder statesman and non-crook Richard Nixon was forced to resign rather than be convicted of burglary and obstruction. Everything is its opposite, the loonies run the asylum. Democrats want to oppress women by allowing them to use birth control, or get innoculated against HPV and by not forcing them to give birth to two-headed, hydrocephalic offspring of rapists. Democrats (according to radio ads for Allen West) want to take away our Social Security, while the Army Colonel who had to resign rather than face 11 years in Leavenworth for war crimes is a "war hero."

Of course it's not just Republicans, it's the Christian Right some of whom insist that "you can't be a Christian if you don't own a gun"  Just like Jesus would if Jesus were his own opposite.

Dr. Gary Cass, with heavy-hitter credentials in the Republican Party and the Bizarro World of forcing militant, heavily armed Christianity upon America and the World -- Dr. Gary who now heads the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission,  perhaps another exercise in contradictory rhetorical gymnastics, insists that Christians need guns because those Satanic, non-cult members want to kill babies and allow people to marry in contradiction of Dr. Gary Cass's 'moral' compass.  Bizarre enough for ya?  Is he saying that these "Christians" need to kill doctors and blow up women's health clinics in the name of morality?  Sounds like it to me, but then it could mean the opposite, couldn't it?

Could it be that the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission is the Bizarro way of being the Defamation-of-everyone-else-Commission?  Certainly, or of course not, depending on whether you're a Bizarre Super Creature or a rational human being. If you are a Bizarro creature, you see, Victims are victimizing the persecutors and the ancient institution that's been persecuting others for millennia, is the Victim here:  the victim of the victims and if you shoot someone for not obeying you, why you're the victim. Just like Jesus.

When arguing with the Right, you can't win because they'll declare you the loser, just Like Superman said -- so should I declare that you can't be a Liberal, or even that you can't be moral if you don't own a gun?  Sounds Bizarro right to me -- make mine a Kalshnikov.

Virginia, the Rape Me State

Sic Semper Tyrannus is the motto of the State of Virginia, but as with any matters involving Republicans, a government is not a tyranny if it subjugates individual liberty to the prejudices and perverted morals of the Religious Right. I read over at The Impolitic that Virginia passed a law last week forcing any woman seeking a legal abortion to have an ultrasound examination. For those who don't know, this means that for a pregnancy in the first trimester, she must, by law, have a probe inserted into her vagina and maneuvered around by a technician until an ultrasound image satisfactory to the state is produced. As Libby points out, without that state mandate, this meets a general description of rape.

It doesn't take much to imagine the feelings, for example, of a 14 year old rape victim being violated a second time by the accursed state that murdered Lincoln and had no reservations about taking children from their mothers and selling them -- or raping those mothers for that matter. It's a state that talks a lot about Jesus and distrusts those who don't. It's a state wherein people tend to like Rick Santorum and others who have a lot to say about what consenting adults can do with what and with which and to whom -- and talk about Jesus and small government a lot.

Keep in mind, this is not an examination done for a medical reason. It's not done to protect the public from a disease or to protect the woman to whom it's being done. It's not something that one can opt out of. It's an act of intimidation and a deliberate act of humiliation. It was passed because of the religious objections of men who were elected to represent everyone, but instead represent preachers and priests -- and in a state that has just decided that a single cell has civil rights but a breathing female of child bearing age has not, can't we be excused for wondering whether these "conservatives" will either ban contraception soon or require some other humiliating procedure before allowing it?

Can't I be excused for seeing this insane drive to bring back the horrors of medieval Europe in high-tech form to a nation that was formed by repugnance for it as anything at all but Conservative?

Where is the outrage from actual conservatives? You know, those people who insist on a government too weak to do anything but leave us alone. I guess when those sentiments put them in a light that makes them seem too much like Liberals who designed a government that must leave us alone and respects the sanctity of our persons, our bodies, our homes and our rights, they scurry like roaches when the lights are switched on. They scurry because they're the same roaches who supported the horror of slavery, the obscenity of racism and are still at war with the rights of women and a government that protects them.

Conservatives, and this liberal, often decry the trend, falsely identified as Liberal, toward seeking safety by making the public helpless and dependent on authority, but it's in conservative strongholds like the secessionist states that we see just how much that obscene ecclesiastical tyranny has made the weakest and most vulnerable totally dependent upon the state in the most personal way. Small government my ass, it's the old Confederacy out of it's coffin like a putrefying zombie, its pockets filled with church money, corporate money, the money of tyrants staggering toward Washington to eat your freedom.

Every sperm is a baby

It will always be impossible to convince all religious people that religion isn't the mother of religious fanaticism and of the self-righteousness that makes fanaticism so dangerous. In fact they may be right in that such ego disorders seem to be a general human failing, albeit one that so often finds a home in Churches, Mosques and Synagogues -- but that doesn't soften the fear that from the frustration believers in old religions feel about the implacable advance of what I like to call enlightenment, a movement will arise like movements in the past to overthrow an age of reason and science and relative freedom.

"any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”


There seems to be nothing in that statement that might hint it did not originate in the 5th century before the Christian era and nothing to suggest that it wasn't a measure introduced by a Republican, but alas, neither is true. Oklahoma State Senator Constance Johnson is a Democrat and she has introduced an amendment to pending Senate Bill 1433, a typical "life begins at conception" bill, that says that the resulting fetus

“at every stage of development (has) all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.”

Ms. Johnson wants to extend that right to a sperm cell, although apparently she thinks egg cells are exempt -- since otherwise not getting pregnant might also be as murderous as masturbation. Still, the "every sperm is a baby" bill doesn't have a chance, but apparently Rick Santorum does and probably for few other reasons than his own ridiculous positions on interfering with private lives in the name of small government and Big Religion. Santorum has attracted a plurality of Republican loonies in Missouri, Colorado and Minnesota.

It's hard to think that Rick has a real shot at the presidency, but you know, I've been looking at Costa Rica lately.

I'm generally very intolerant of the "both sides are equally bad" arguments that depend on fraudulent accounting and false equivalence to forgive the side with the preponderance of guilt, but Geez - what does it say about Oklahoma Democrats that she is allowed to speak for them?

Religious Fascism: The Faith Masquerade

"When Fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." (generally attributed to Sinclair Lewis)

I grew up in eastern North Carolina. My immediate family converted to Catholicism when I was seven. Some of our relatives were convinced that we were going to hell for worshiping statues, praying to the Virgin Mary, and not being baptized in the name of Jesus only. In other words, I grew up with crazy fundamentalists in my family. However, I never feared their beliefs. They talked a lot but didn't appear to pose a threat to others who did not believe as they did.

But today I came across an organization known as the  The Liberty Counsel and their stated goal is Restoring the Culture by Advancing Religious Freedom, the Sanctity of Human Life and the Family.

Doesn't sound so scary in and of itself, but the Liberty Counsel doesn't literally mean freedom to believe or not believe as you wish. The Counsel believes that it is its mission to advance our freedom to believe in a Christian God. The anchor of the Counsel is its fully accredited law school, Liberty University School of Law, located in Lynchburg, Virginia. Its web site touts its "40 years of training champions for Christ." From its mission statement: "The proficient use of reason informed and animated by faith and a comprehensive Christian worldview is the means to revitalizing what is central to the American legal system--the rule of law." (There are 202 attorneys in the 112th US Congress out of a total of 535 members of Congress. Washington Wire, 1/5/2011).

The web site also features a video with a special message from Newt Gingrich. Presumably Gingrich is comfortable with the law school's blend of law and religion, and its goal of injecting that blend into the rule of law.

The document that lead me to the Counsel was a piece entitled Declaration of American Values, with excerpts posted to Facebook by author Pam Spaulding. (I count on Pam to lead me to interesting material and she never fails to do so.) The Declaration appears to be the Counsel's proposal for a new Declaration of Independence and contains such gems as the following:

• To secure our national interest in the institution of marriage and family by embracing the union of one man and one woman as the sole form of legitimate marriage and the proper basis of family.
• To secure the free exercise of religion for all people, including the freedom to acknowledge God through our public institutions and other modes of public expression and the freedom of religious conscience without coercion by penalty or force of law.
• To secure the moral dignity of each person, acknowledging that obscenity, pornography, and indecency debase our communities, harm our families, and undermine morality and respect. Therefore, we promote enactment and enforcement of laws to protect decency and traditional morality.
• To secure the individual right to own, possess, and use firearms as central to the preservation of peace and liberty.

There are ten declarations in all, plus a preamble and a closing vow asserting that an unidentified "we" pledge their names, their lives, and their honor to upholding this declaration of American values. 

The Christian fundamentalists of my childhood were goodhearted people for the most part who sincerely believed that it was their duty to try and save the souls of sinners. They were not interested in controlling the government; they sought their guidance from their churches and did their proselytizing via their churches. Today's Christian Right is a different breed. They are not necessarily fundamentalists; they adhere to a literal reading of the Bible only when it suits their purposes.  As a whole, they are better educated than their fundamentalists predecessors, churned out by private religious colleges and universities.  They encompass middle and upper class demographics. They seek power and control, and view religion as a tool to achieve both. They are dangerous. 

It is not enough that they share their beliefs with those who embrace the same values. What they want is to impose their beliefs, their will, on the rest of us. Fanaticism begets a rabid vigilance to convert or destroy all who would dare walk to a different drummer. There is no group more dangerous than those who believe or profess to believe in some mythological anointment of their cause by a supreme being. History is littered with atrocities perpetrated in the name of someone's God.

Please understand that it is not genuinely held personal faith or spiritual belief that I'm speaking of, but a rigid fanaticism in which one group insists upon imposing its views, its beliefs, its will upon others. I'm speaking of groups such as this Liberty Counsel, which adorns itself with the trappings of law, wraps itself in the American flag, and with its Bible clasped in one hand is as dangerous and frightening as any fascist.

Such groups must be revealed, dragged into the light if necessary. Their power lies in their chameleon like ability to blend in, to appear to be simply promoting sensible values that will benefit all of us. We must be vigilant and unafraid in shouting to the rafters that not only does the emperor have no clothes on, the emperor is also a liar and a fraud.


Definition of FASCISM

1

often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

2

: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control 

The Cracked Obelisk

" Ladies and gentlemen I don’t want to get weird on this so please take it for what it’s worth. But it seems to me the Washington Monument is a symbol of America’s power, it has been the symbol of our great nation, we look at that monument and say this is one nation under God. Now there’s a crack in it, there’s a crack in it and it’s closed up. Is that a sign from the Lord? Is that something that has significance or is it just result of an earthquake? You judge, but I just want to bring that to your attention. It seems to me symbolic. When Jesus was crucified and when he died the curtain in the Temple was rent from top to bottom and there was a tear and it was extremely symbolic, is this symbolic? You judge."

-Pat Robertson-

______________________

Beside the fact that this contemptible idiot is low enough to compare Washington DC to Jerusalem and medieval enough to insinuate that every shake rattle and roll this planet has experienced in the four billion years it's been around indicates the anger of God, besides the fact that this worm thinks his hate is God's hate, he presumes to speak for me and for America in general and that's unforgivable.

No sir, and I use that title in a contemptuous way, I don't think of a nation under God when I look at that monument and I'm certainly old enough to remember when the Knights of Columbus inter alia twisted Eisenhower's arm into bastardizing the children's pledge in 1954. I think of a victorious general and of the first president of the first secular democracy in Western history -- a man who asserted that this is not a nation under Pat Robertson's God or anyone else's.

Like some prehistoric shaman, squinting at goat entrails and attributing every meteor and comet and eclipse to angry but invisible entities for his own detestable profit, Pat Robertson always has a list of grievances to air when any natural process is noticed. Those grievances seem to have little to do with evil even on a gigantic scale, as God never shook his finger at Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Tomas de Torquemada for that matter, but only at the failure of our secular government to assume the aspect of God's enforcers in private matters - like love - that this black-hearted abomination can make a career out of raging about.

It's not of course that this tin-horn prophet is alone, nor is it restricted to pseudo-Christian pretenders like Robertson who have decided that tolerance for love's many forms is God's main obsession rather than injustice and oppression and exploitation or even murder. Yahweh, the Hammer of Homosexuals.

It's an insult to God, an insult to America; to freedom, to Democracy, to secularism and religious tolerance and all the other things our country actually is "under." This of course is the Worm who told us that God had no power over plate tectonics when the tsunami hit the eastern Pacific not long ago, but yes, I'll judge and I'll judge you viciously. I can't shake the ground or crack monuments and I'm too furious to crack jokes but because God is always silent and never says the same thing to different people: because divine retribution is indistinguishable from random natural events, I will judge you myself, weigh your words and find you wanting.

Justified?

I'm constantly deleting political diatribes from my in-box that begin with wild claims about something the "liberal press" isn't telling us for nefarious reasons. Nearly always, it's already been in the headlines or never happened in the first place, but here's a story that doesn't seem to be getting enough exposure, considering the rants and tirades coming from Rush and Fox and other people trying to twist the Oslo massacre into something that shows persecution of Christians, whom we all know are never, ever violent -- not like those amoral Mao-loving Stalinist Atheists and devil worshiping Kalashnikov-carrying Muslims.

According to a new Gallup poll, when asked whether they're against violence that kills civilians, Muslims are most likely to answer in the affirmative at 78%. Atheists and agnostics are second at 56%, while only 38% of Protestants and 39% of Catholics would agree with such an affirmation of the value of human life.

Let me repeat it for the benefit of the many-headed beast: over 60% of those who identify as Christians, the overwhelming majority of Americans, will tolerate the slaughter of innocents versus only 22% of Muslims. Would I define all of these people as Christians - or Muslims for that matter? No I wouldn't, but that's hardly the point. It's wrong to absolve people with such a hypocritical ploy. Neither the Torah, the Bible nor the Quir'an ever killed anyone, but there is enough in them to provide a template, an excuse, a justification for nearly any abomination.

My long standing opinion that there are hardly any Christians around still stands and among that few, many would tell you the others weren't Christian either - as history proves, but applied to the question with us today: "is this a Christian Nation, based on Christian principles?" I can insist it's not. To the question of "are those alleged principles the best and only way" I would try not to laugh and offer the suggestion that we could use a large dose of Muslim and Humanist principles if we'd like Jesus to smile upon our arrogance, hypocrisy and pretension.

When asked whether it was justifiable for "an individual person or a small group of persons to target and kill civilians," Muslims still were far more likely to be 'Christian' about it with 89% answering in the negative and Christians again coming in last, behind the godless infidel. Can we begin to understand that the ancient religious wars between Christian, Jew, Muslim, pagan and infidel have little to do with anything good.

Of course, to attempt discussion using terms like justice is like juggling water, but in my opinion, the enormous industry that scripts our opinions for us is showing it's hand here -- or bloody claw, if you prefer. If you want to know why we are the way we are regarding placing blame for violence and hatred, I might speculate that Muslims and Atheists and free thinkers aren't likely to be watching Fox or to follow Beck or Limbaugh or their hate filled and dishonest rants, while those who call themselves part of the Religious Right often do.

A year ago, a Pew Poll found that only 30 percent of Americans in general have a favorable view of Muslims. I think we know why and I think we know who is behind the unrelenting defamation: burning books, carrying signs in the street and opposing basic freedoms for Muslims in America.

After all, who has the most to gain from vilifying infidels or anyone else trying to oppose replacing secular law with Gospel Law? What are the goals of people who condemn humanism and those who assert their reverence for human life?

I have no doubt that the Religious Right will have no choice but to ignore these numbers or attack them with some neo-Ernulphian malediction and a chorus of Liberaiberaliberal and there is less than no doubt that they'll never give up on the notion of their special privileges and special, God-given right to dictate to all of us, lashing out at enemies they create for the purpose of distraction and ignoring the casualties.

91 dead in Oslo

People have made it very clear to me that Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Murrah Federal building in 1995 was not a Christian, the connection between that vicious, inhuman act and the Waco, Texas incident notwithstanding. He couldn't be, you see, by virtue of the fact that he did such a thing.

It's too bad that Muslims who are horrified by terrorism aren't given the benefit of the same rationale, but I'm still waiting to hear about Anders Behring Breivik. Despite the initial prejudice that had the Oslo bombing and the murders at a Summer camp as the work of al Qaeda, it looks like Breivik, identified by a survivor as the attacker, was a Christian Conservative disturbed by the presence of other cultures, other religions, in Norway. Would he fit in with a spectrum of Americans, from the Aryan Brotherhood to the Tea Party, trying to promote our intentionally secular Republic as a "Christian nation" and perhaps an exclusively Christian nation?

How long can we go on pretending that religious tribalism of any denomination hasn't been and doesn't remain a potentially destructive, oppressive and communicable human vice?

The American Taliban

Well, Rick Santorum has joined Michele Bachmann in signing the Family Leader pledge, also known as

THE MARRIAGE VOW
A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMiLY

As far as I can tell, that small "i" in the word family is supposed to denote humility or some crap. It's also the only sign of humility on the whole damned Family Leader website (other than repeated uses of the words "humble" and "humility," of course). They're associated with both "Focus on the Family" and the "Family Research Council," two of the most strident right-wing Christian conservative groups out there.

The president of Family Leader is Bob Vander Plaats, and he's a special breed of crazy. He's tried to explain in the past that same-sex marriage will inevitably lead to the suspension of the Constitution, the removal of property rights for individuals, and the destruction of the Second Amendment. (Yes, I'm serious about that.) His former campaign manager describes him as "obsessed with the gay-marriage issue."

Since most of the items on the Family Leader's little list have been staple Republican issues for years, I'm not entirely clear why so many of the other front-runners in the 2012 GOP Goat Rodeo are backing slowly away from it. Except that maybe, when you put it all in one place like this, it becomes a little more distasteful to the average American.

Because, really, what this "vow" wants is to put the Christian Taliban in place in America.

There have been a number of objections to parts of this pledge. For example, the first bullet point listed during the preamble to this steaming pile of piety is fascinating.

• Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an AfricanAmerican baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.

As Cheryl Contee put it at Jack & Jill Politics:

Given that families were broken up regularly for sales during slavery and that rape by masters was pretty common, this could not be more offensive. I mean, putting aside the statistics on this, which are likely off-base, I could not be more angry. When will Republicans inquire with (sic) actual Black people whether or not we’re ok with invoking slavery to score cheap political points?

But let's take a look at the actual "Candidate Vow" that Bachmann and Santorum signed on to support, shall we?

Personal fidelity to my spouse.

So, we're not likely to see this supported by Newt Gingrich, are we? Or, for that matter, most Republicans. Somewhere between John McCain's divorces and John Boehner's rumored affairs, I don't see the GOP adopting this as a plank, really.

Respect for the marital bonds of others.

Unless you're gay-married. Because that's just icky.

Official fidelity to the U.S. Constitution, supporting the elevation of none but faithful constitutionalists as judges or justices.

See, now, there's a tricky issue, right there. Because a "faithful constitutionalist" wouldn't have allowed any Constitutional Amendments, would he? So that whole "Bill of Rights" thing? Yeah, that's out the window. We wouldn't have had to ban Prohibition, but, then again, we wouldn't have had Prohibition in the first place, so I guess there's that.

Oh, and blacks would only be three-fifths of a person. You know, it's the little issues like these that make me wonder about "constitutional originalists."

Vigorous opposition to any redefinition of the Institution of Marriage – faithful monogamy between one man and one woman – through statutory-, bureaucratic-, or court-imposed recognition of intimate unions which are bigamous, polygamous, polyandrous, same-sex, etc.

Yup, there's that gay marriage thing again.

Recognition of the overwhelming statistical evidence that married people enjoy better health, better sex, longer lives, greater financial stability, and that children raised by a mother and a father together experience better learning, less addiction, less legal trouble, and less extramarital pregnancy.

Wow. Coming from people who refuse to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution and global warming, that's almost humorous. But what the hell does it really mean? "Recognition of the evidence?" Doesn't really say anything, except "yeah, I guess that's right..."

Support for prompt reform of uneconomic, anti-marriage aspects of welfare policy, tax policy, and marital/divorce law, and extended "second chance" or "cooling-off" periods for those seeking a "quickie divorce."

"uneconomic, anti-marriage aspects of welfare policy, tax policy"? Wow, that would be a fascinating list. Of course, since you've already accepted their bullshit studies in the previous paragraph, I guess the list of what you have to support has probably already been made.

Earnest, bona fide legal advocacy for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) at the federal and state levels.

That's funny. You'd think that the part of DOMA that keeps states from having to accept gay marriages from other states would bother those "constitutional originalists," wouldn't it? You know, that whole Full Faith and Credit Clause (Article IV, Section 1, US Constitution), where it says that "acts, records and judicial proceedings (from each state) shall have the same full faith and credit in every court within the United States and its Territories and Possessions" as they do in the original state.

Steadfast embrace of a federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which protects the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman in all of the United States.

See? Once again, "constitutional originalists" who want to amend the fucking Constitution.

Logic. It's not just for breakfast anymore.

Humane protection of women and the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy – our next generation of American children – from human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, abortion and other types of coercion or stolen innocence.

You know, right at first glance, that looks like a really good part of this whole vow. It's a list of stuff everybody should be against, right?

Well, look closer. Once you get past the "human trafficking" and "sexual slavery," you'll notice that "abortion" is right there next to "infanticide," you'll note that they're not only trying to ban prostitution, but pornography. (We'll be dealing, of course, with their definition of pornography.) And can you please explain what they mean by "seduction into promiscuity" or "other types of coercion or stolen innocence?"

I mean, come on! Do you know how many things have been said to lead to promiscuity? Music of just about every kind, whether rock, rap or pop - go back far enough, even jazz has been accused of being "devil music." The media in general might be at fault. Even dancing at all is immoral. (You didn't think that the screenwriter for Footloose - Dean Pitchford, if you're curious - got the idea out of nowhere, did you?)

It isn't just sexy clothing that lead our children away from the Paths of Righteousness, it might even be something as simple as pants.

The list is endless. So how far do you think these people will want to press the issue?

Support for the enactment of safeguards for all married and unmarried U.S. Military and National Guard personnel, especially our combat troops, from inappropriate same-gender or opposite-gender sexual harassment, adultery or intrusively intimate commingling among attracteds (restrooms, showers, barracks, tents, etc.); plus prompt termination of military policymakers who would expose American wives and daughters to rape or sexual harassment, torture, enslavement or sexual leveraging by the enemy in forward combat roles.

The gays again. This time in our military. (Maybe Vander Plaats really is obsessed with homosexuality. Methinks he doth protest too much...)

And incidentally, the womenfolk aren't strong enough to be in the military! They need to be back home pumping out babies!

Rejection of Sharia Islam and all other anti-woman, anti-human rights forms of totalitarian control.

Um... does that include the stuff in the Bible, too? Because I might be willing to support this if it did.

Recognition that robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security.

You know, that doesn't necessarily sound all that scary, because many of you might not be familiar with the Quiverfull movement. Yeah, they're out there.

Commitment to downsizing government and the enormous burden upon American families of the USA's $14.3 trillion public debt, its $77 trillion in unfunded liabilities, its $1.5 trillion federal deficit, and its $3.5 trillion federal budget.

Except for those parts of the government that do the stuff we want, and the new parts to support the requirements of this vow right here...

Fierce defense of the First Amendment's rights of Religious Liberty and Freedom of Speech, especially against the intolerance of any who would undermine law-abiding American citizens and institutions of faith and conscience for their adherence to, and defense of, faithful heterosexual monogamy.

Free speech, but only for our side. You have to admire that one.

OK, so maybe I do see why the other GOP candidates aren't signing on to this.
_____________

Update (7/11/11): Although the link I used shows the original, it seems that FAMiLY LEADER has removed the only-offensive-if-you-know-a-black-person bullet point about slavery. And seriously, you can't blame them - there can't be more than 12 black people in Iowa, can there? And you can't expect Bob Vander Plaats to know all of them, can you?

A horse of the same color

Take Herman Cain -- please. Take him far away from any office that allows him to rule and ruin other people with his beliefs; allows him to substitute his beliefs for law and invent crimes at will. Cain, you see, says that homosexuality is a "choice" and is a sin and he believes it because he believes it and that makes it true.

“I believe homosexuality is a sin because I’m a Bible-believing Christian, I believe it’s a sin,”

he says and yes, that's just the sort of thing Republicans like to pass off as reason and package this fear of retributive and divine bogeymen with fear of communism and common decency like Wall Street packages bad loans.

Sin, Mr. Cain, is not crime, it's a tool used to tyrannize the mind and because the sin of one frame of reference is not the sin of another and because we are a government of laws and not of prophets and because those laws are designed to protect liberty and property and not to protect your tangled web of beliefs or promote them or ennoble them or sanctify them or elevate them to the status of law and permit them to persecute others: and because sir, you are a man like the rest of us, neither better nor worse nor more to be obeyed because of your beliefs, you should save them for Sunday and leave the rest of us the hell alone with your damned arrogant beliefs. No man is elevated by standing on Bibles.



Preacher Cain of course would be a good choice for the GOP at this point -- evidence that they're not really racists and have only set the dogs on that other black man because he's not Christian enough or as concerned with the things God hates like Medicare or the Minimum wage. A different shade of black man and one more easily used as a tool to get things back to the way they used to be when there was a place for everyone and everyone was in his place.

God Control

By Capt. Fogg


I've said quite a bit about gun control; pretty much all I'm going to say, actually. There is something far more pernicious, more dangerous and more in need of control however and that's God. It's hard to deny although that doesn't prevent most people from denying it, God has been on the wrong side of things as often as the right side: slavery, conquest, persecutions, genocide. You name it; God has been the universal justification as often as the universal opponent.

So it isn't surprising that God now seems to be against Net Neutrality. Sure he is -- and our founding fathers who don't seem to have believed in the kind of god who gets involved in such matters as free markets thought so too. That's the thing about God's likes and dislikes and mysterious plans: people just make them up as they go along.

Take David Barton, for instance, allegedly one of the country's most influential Evangelicals. He thinks that government should stay out of the lives of selected people and should, in the name of freedom and less intrusive government, regulate the most private and personal consensual sexual behavior. That's nothing new, of course, but it may surprise you that according to the Gospel as invented by Barton, God hates net neutrality and wants the internet dominated by the powerful and rich. God and the Puritans brought us prosperity because we're not socialists. The rest of the world got their prosperity from the Devil apparently and Jesus was just joking about rich men and heaven. How can we question that?

God wills it -- just like God willed the Crusades and the extermination of European Jews: just like he willed the divine right of kings and the right of the Church to approve their power. He demanded a secular Democracy in the Colonies, some of them, while simultaneously mandating the power of George III, Rex Dei Gratia.

Face it, it's long since been far out of hand and the will of god has become indistinguishable from the background noise of commerce. Did God have an interest in boosting tobacco sales. He obviously, if we're to believe this radio troll, has an interest in the rights of corporations which exceeds his concern for the poor. Does God like free markets, or does he like kings? Does the Bible speak against Net Neutrality or call it Socialism. Does God hate Socialism or does he like you to share everything you have with the poor and sick? Depends on who you ask and of course I won't be asking the Religious right who I can't tell from the Religious wrong of late.

One thing our constitution does uphold, is the free exercise of religion, so lunatics and tyrants and even evil men like Barton get to rave on unmolested. The government can't really exercise God control and more than God can control the evil spewed out by Barton's forked tongue. It's up to me and you to be aware that whether or not it was God, Guns and Guts that made America "great" those things will serve any master with equal ferocity. Mention God and nobody can shut you up, nobody can really contradict you and millions will follow you through the gates of hell, raging and bellowing, cheering and jeering like the lost souls we are.

St. Paul, Defender of the Faith.

By Captain Fogg

(with an afterthought from Octopus)

One of the things I have liked about Congressman Ron Paul is that he's often been on the side of deregulating private life and consensual behavior, but either he doesn't mean what he says or he is willing to say what he doesn't mean in order to curry favor with the Great Regulators of the Religious right.

Speaking in Iowa recently, Mr. Paul said:

"The Defense of Marriage Act was enacted in 1996 to stop Big Government in Washington from re-defining marriage and forcing its definition on the States. Like the majority of Iowans, I believe that marriage is between one man and one woman and must be protected."

That resonates in my ears as a statement of his religious persuasion and of course he was speaking to a group of religions conservatives representing denominations opposed to letting people decide for themselves about such matters. Other religions might have other ideas and indeed some do. In other words these are people quite open about forcing their definition on Americans.

I find it curious that proponents of defining marriage according to religious definitions always use the word "is" where one expects "should be," "ought to be" or "must be" and there must be a reason for it. Marriage, after all is a human institution and marriage customs vary amongst groups of humans. Perhaps "is" is a way to pretend that it's written into the fabric of the cosmos like general relativity or the uncertainty principle. It isn't.

Of course Paul couched his opposition to doing away with the Defense of Marriage act in terms of states rights and whether or not he was following in the tradition of all the other "states rights" defenses of so many other things we now see as unjust, it's a defense of something with as limited a future as our embarrassing misogyny laws of recent memory. A minority of the country oppose preventing people from marrying whom they will and I can't help but find my feeling that the history of humankind's progress toward democracy is once again being thwarted by the notion of a divine will that opposes our allegedly innate liberty.

When someone who has been so stalwart in defending the Constitution and restraining government power, promotes such peremptory views on the most personal of choices, it seems a jarring discontinuity that makes on question the man and everything else he's described as being unconstitutional. It's hard to understand why he's willing to use government power to defend a certain Faith when that is something the government is expressly forbidden to do.

Yes, I know. I've been talking a lot about religion of late, but to me, there is no other force in American affairs more intractable than the movement to force compliance to religious standards on people who have or wish to have no affiliation with those standards and prefer the right to make personal choices according to their own consciences. That ability, that kind of freedom is the beating heart of liberal democracy. If we lose that, we lose it all.

It's sad to see Congressman Paul speaking this way. I once had high hopes for him, if not as Presidential material, certainly as a voice of reason and restraint at a time when the Republican party seems increasingly controlled by anti-democratic, anti-libertarian influences. Now he seems far less of a libertarian, far more of an authoritarian and indistinguishable from any other politician groveling before the powerful.

An afterthought from Octopus, who picks up where Captain Fogg leaves off: “indistinguishable from any other politician groveling before the powerful”

When we construct a hypothesis to explain any observed phenomena, the idea is to find the simplest possible construct that best fits the data. If you accept the premise that “pandering and political opportunism” is the motive that drives the Elder Paul, there is a good chance this hypothesis will withstand scrutiny. If you attribute religious belief in the broadest possible context as his motive, there are too many hypothesis-challenging exceptions to pass muster.

Not all religious denominations, for example, share the views of the Elder Paul. Look no further than the Reverend Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, President of The Interfaith Alliance, who has long criticized the abuse and misuse of religion in our public life.

Politicians are known to contradict themselves when stoking the fears of key constituencies and stakeholders, and Ron Paul is no exception. Inasmuch as the base of his party is right leaning and reactionary, why should his tilt towards authoritarian social control surprise us? The bogeyman behind the words is the bogeyman of wedge politics as candidates jockey for position and influence. I hope this clarifies Captain Fogg’s point.

Permit me this brief digression. Last night, I sent these links to Captain Fogg as ideas for a future discussion: The Ashtray: The Ultimatum (Part One) and The Ashtray: Shifting Paradigms (Part Two). Readers may want to read these links first to brush up on the issues before continuing. Here is the first analogy.

You have two fish in a fishbowl. One of them is golden in color; the other one is not. The fish that is golden in color, you name “Goldie.” The other fish you name “Greenie.” Perhaps you use the description “the gold fish” and point to the one that is golden in color. You are referring to the gold fish, Goldie. Over the course of time, however, Goldie starts to change color. Six months later, Goldie is no longer golden. Goldie is now green. Greenie, the other fish — the fish in the bowl that was green in color — has turned golden (…) The description theory would have it that Goldie means the fish that is golden in color, but if that’s true then when we refer to Goldie, we are referring to the other fish. But clearly, Goldie hasn’t become a different fish; Goldie has merely changed … appearance.

The flaw in the "Goldie" analogy is the misuse of semantics, of identifier and modifier merged into one and used interchangeably in the sense that: (1) a proper name identifies “Goldie” as the subject of this thought experiment, and (2) a modifier describe the properties of said subject such as color. In common parlance, a proper name is not subject to changes in appearance; whereas our choice of modifiers tends to be mutable and subject to revision as we observe change. Nice idea. I get the historical persistence point: Fishy example. In fewer words, if a very tall couple - well over six and half feet tall - plan to have children, they should never name their firstborn “Tiny Earl.” We need look no further than historical and comparative linguistics and the Brothers Grimm in search for better examples.

Similarly, Kuhn’s “paradigm shift” may have a certain revolutionary allure and Che Guevara appeal, but it fails to account for context and continuity, and the best example I can give is the difference between Newton versus Einstein. Although Kuhn may cite Einstein as an example of paradigm shift, the proper context is to view Newton as a subset of Einstein, not merely within the timeline of history but in how we observe the same phenomena at different velocities. Thus, there is nothing incommensurable in the shift from Newton to Einstein.

It seems the writer of the NYT article (Morris) understood these issues intuitively but could not articulate them with sufficient explanatory adequacy. Rightfully, Kuhn threw an ashtray at Morris who did not completely think through his homework.

All this brings me to a challenging subject. When we apply pure reason to various disciplines, we find that reason is time delimited, i.e. a snapshot of what we perceive at fixed points in time. Inasmuch as reason has been exalted as a reliable and trustworthy source of truth, such is not necessarily the case. The words that inform thought are plastic and malleable; the tools of reason are themselves flawed and forever changing; and the products of reason (i.e. the conclusions derived thereof) are subject to revision upon revision. If there is an evil genius at work, at least these preoccupations keep the Wunderkinder employed.

Perhaps another way of looking at things is not to pit religion against science, or reason against its presumed opposite, whatever the opposite of reason is, but to acknowledge all aspects of mind in more holistic terms – that consciousness is an adaptation leading to the more successful regulation of life. The conscious mind infuses human beings with an instinct to probe the unknown, and these faculties of mind take many forms: Sensory experience, emotions, inspiration, intuition, epistemology, phenomenology, logic and scientific observation … all contributing to a human penchant for speculative imagination. Why prejudice one aspect of mind against another when we should start this inquiry within the context of our long and tortuous journey that began ages ago in the Great Rift Valley.

Start your engines. Are we bursting with ideas?

Thus Spake Shimkus

Now, this atheist has been accused of having it in for Christians, but since I staunchly maintain I've never met one, I must deny it. What makes me the angriest, and it does make me angry, is not some abstract faith in an ineffable power, but the scriptural inerrancy epidemic spreading like a dangerous plague. It's not a Christian thing, it's a dementia thing and as far as Bible as the inerrant word of God cult goes, it's a stupid thing. All religions and much political thought is susceptible to the disease.

There isn't any God but the ones we make up, nor does he do anything we don't do for him, but if our definition includes honesty or coherence or lack of self-contradiction or even a 21st century child's knowledge of cosmology, he didn't write the books of Moses, the Gospels, the various different versions of Isiah found at Qumran or any of the rest of it, culled and selected and edited and redacted by generations of people from a wider library of books. For lack of space I simply can't cover all the territory, but for it to have been written by an all-knowing, it must describe an alternate universe, not this one.

But I digress. My point was that Jews like Representative John Shimkus (R-IL) have been turned into truth eating zombies far more dangerous than B movie producers ever imagined. It's not a Christian thing. He thinks that we shouldn't worry about climate change because God won't allow any dire consequences. It's not that I think we're likely to all be drowned and not about how accurate I think current projections might or might not be, it's that people of this ilk get people killed. Electing Shimkus is like hiring a blind chauffeur who drives by faith. He's like a general who tells his troops the other guys are firing blanks. Don't mind those bullets, our religion will protect you, said Jack Wilson and not one bullet was stopped and how many Indians died? If you're not dumb enough to think that's right, you're too smart to support Shimkus in seeking chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

No, Shimkus believes in his version of his selected book and not in any other. If I could ask him why, he'd either have to do his own Ghost Dance or give me evidence for it's power to predict what will or won't happen with the weather, crustal movements, the evolution of microbes the outcome of battles and the flight paths of asteroids - and he can't. There's no test of reality it can pass. There's no way to show it more accurate than the Popol Vuh or the Quir'an or Bullfinch's Mythology, Aesop's Fables or a random number generator. Therefore the choice is his and it's a choice not based on evidence. What he calls God's voice is Shimkus' voice and thus spake Shimkus and Shimkus alone.

I'm always amused by people who call my logic arrogant. As people who tell you what God will or will not do and does or does not like, the title really belongs with believers, not with skeptics since we're not claiming anything special. The burden of proof to show that since there are an infinite number of words from an infinite possibility of gods, it's just your personal celestial ventriloquism at work? I don't have to, I'm not making assertions. The burden is on the believer. They proclaim endlessly about God's will as clearly set forth but when the predictions don't work, or contradict themselves, when life and death are random and there's no order or justice - well then they say we can't understand. Which is it?

It's your choice what to believe and your conclusions are no more divine than mine, although your knowledge may be superior and your reasoning better: it's still only you and me. God hates fags? Well no he doesn't, but I'm speaking of the true god Zog and I should know since I invented him and can invent as many more as I like all equally above question. Zog knows all about physics and mathematics and history and in fact everything I know, he knows -- and that's surely more than yours does. Zog says magic doesn't work, prayers fall on deaf ears, no danger will be averted lest you take measures and I know it's true because I believe and my belief can't be shown to be more or less well founded by any means I know of.

The Angle of reflection

A significant part of the Republican "message" has been that our secular laws derive from a largely mythical "Judeo-Christian" system of values. Yes, the adage about strange bedfellows is true, but politics and religion, being in bed together, tend to spawn strange offspring and to dress them up as reason and decency.

Of course it's true that a great number of our laws do reflect religious prohibitions, biases and attitudes and those laws often criminalize behavior that involves no harm to people or property and interferes with personal liberty, but those taboos seem to be shared by a great number of cultures which adhere to religions from Animism to Confucianism. There's little that's unique about our alleged Christian values and from the start, many of those values were at odds with our independence and our freedom. Yes, it's hard to think of a religion of any kind that has no rules of behavior but we're talking about Americans -- the people at the center of the universe who don't really think much about thinking or the necessity of reason.

So when we pass laws forbidding dancing on Friday, the observation or rejection of Christmas, the reading of certain books: when we make laws concerning who may live together, have sex together and in what way, we have illustrations of religious law intruding into secular life in America. Such things are slowly eroding and always changing, of course, but the prospect of a group that has always composed a small minority in the US: The Muslims, supporting certain religious rules within their own congregations and amongst their adherents, seems to have all the bells in the national belfry ringing in discord.

Islamic religious law, says Sharon Angle, is "taking hold" in some American cities and that's a "militant terrorist situation." No, really. I suppose it's wildly different in a terrorist sort of way for Jews to forbid Pork and Lobster or cheeseburgers or to require prayer at certain times and even to mandate beards or distinctive clothing. I suppose it's not the same thing for Catholics to forbid divorce and require celibacy of certain people and distinctive clothing for the clergy. The special Mormon underwear? Prohibitions against alcohol and coffee? Is the Church of Latter Day Saints "taking over" Utah and the constitution taken to the shredder? No, there's no militant terrorist situation there. Is there really a chance that the constitution will be supplanted by the Amish Ordnung even if an area has a majority of that peaceful faith? So why are we afraid and what are we really afraid of? Why does Sharon Angle say:

"It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States?"

Well, of course we wouldn't pay any attention to such a person as she if she weren't outrageous, but if we were a nation that could notice that these religious rules are in no respect taking hold of municipal governments and in fact are optional personal choices in a nation that allows us to make such choices freely, perhaps Sharon Angle would be all alone in some little room raving at the walls and not on national TV farting out her fallacies, misrepresentations and hysterical lies -- and God help us, running for the US Senate. Sure there would be something fundamentally wrong, but more certainly: it isn't happening here. Religion, say the courts, gives no license to break the law whether that faith demands we strangle a wayward daughter or drag a gay man behind a pickup truck or poison our congregation with cyanide.

The key word here is "Foreign." Although virtually all our religions are imported and many religious groups immigrated simply so that they could have communities with their own religious rules, Angle wants to reinforce the chauvinism of a certain kind of self-styled Christian who would be quite happy with a massively powerful government intent on substituting their own 'Christian' restrictions for our secular constitution. She is, most ironically, the best example of what she wants us to fear. Muslims and certain other people will always be "foreign" and most of us will never pause to reflect upon the horrible consequences that xenophobic, nationalistic bit of European bigotry had in the last century.

But we're not a nation of critical thinkers; at least not enough of us to give reason or even common decency a fighting chance. Bigotry, our real national religion, forbids it after all and we make demons out of people who don't want to participate or worst of all, don't want any religion forced on them.

Angle would like to pass on her contagious nightmare and indeed I know too many people who share it and who will refuse to be persuaded that even if we someday have an Ayatollah of Texas, he's not going to be able to use force to punish reprobates and infidels or have any more secular authority than an Archbishop or TV evangelist. They refuse to remember when Roman Catholics were a "foreign" religion to be feared for inquisitions and foreign rule over Americans. Somehow that "hopey-changey" thing did work our fairly well for them and for the many others who have had to contend with the Know-Nothing nativists and the Sharon Angles of their day.