Specifically, a Nebraska state senator is suing God (h/t Volokh Consp.)
That’s not nearly as funny as the time someone sued Satan. It was dismissed in part for failure to plead personal jurisdiction or to include instructions for service of process.
A recent World Net Daily article bemoans “The Rise of Atheist America.”
In earlier eras, atheists were on the fringes of society, mistrusted by the mainstream. Those few who dared to publicly push their beliefs on society, like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, were widely regarded as malevolent kooks. But today, Hitchens’ No. 1 New York Times bestseller, which has dominated the nonfiction charts for months, boldly condemns religion – including Christianity – as “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”
The article goes on to raise a number of points (I won’t quite call them interesting, or apply any adjective, for that matter), but at no point does it actually refute any of the allegations references in the above quote.
I have to agree with Skepchick’s idea to make this into a poster:
You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. I’m not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future.
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What kind of atheist are you?
created with QuizFarm.com
I was just reading about a Dallas-area megachurch that is refusing to bury a gay man (and Gulf War veteran) now that they know he was gay:
“We did decline to host the service – not based on hatred, not based on discrimination, but based on principle,” [the church’s pastor, the Rev. Gary] Simons told The Associated Press. “Had we known it on the day they first spoke about it – yes, we would have declined then. It’s not that we didn’t love the family.”
What, you might ask, does this have to do with the shame of Topeka, Kansas? I am coming to believe that, to an outside observer, any ideology is only as good as its worst practitioner. By that I mean that the merits of a religion, political theory, or other worldview or ideology must be judged by its worst possible application. Marxism might have sounded okay at one time on paper, but then it yielded Lenin, and, well, pretty much every communist shithead to come after him. To use a contemporary, local example, American-style Democracy (at least the way it is described by the Bush administration) may be dipping in global popularity, probably due to widespread cognitive dissonance brought on by the administration’s words and actions. We, as Americans, may have a pretty good view of democracy, at least as compared to life in North Korea, since we have lived with it, and generally haven’t been waterboarded, for all of our lives. Much of the rest of the world is under no obligation to ignore what America is actually doing in the world and to drink the democracy Kool-Aid Bush/Cheney is serving.
Getting back to my original point (since I at least take it as axiomatic that Bush/Cheney is an undemocratic thug), a common refrain among many Christians is that homosexuality is a sin that should be discouraged as much as possible. Really, the logical application of this belief is to discourage it at every turn–God’s retribution would be quite widespread, wouldn’t it?. By the same token, of course, all other sins should be equally discouraged, but then there would hardly be any time to find food and shelter. The Dallas megachurch is really just a tamer example of Rev. Freddie’s hobby. Rev. Freddie seems to have concluded that the whole world is going to hell and it is his job to constantly remind us of that, and he is doing it in the name of God, Christ, and all Christians, whether they realize/like it or not.
Speaking as a Non-Practicing Atheist and Recovering Christian, I’m hardly in an ideal position to respond to Rev. Freddie, but I will say this: his actions soil the image of Christianity and Christians everywhere, much as Islam is sullied by terror and Hinduism is tarnished by naitonalism in India (don’t even get me started on Israel and anti-Semitism). Christians everywhere need to put up or shut up–you support Rev. Freddie, you oppose him, or there is a more–gasp–nuanced view of this whole issue.
I do have something to say directly to Rev. Freddie, though, because I think the bulk of his power comes from the simple fact that he gets so damn much attention (I admit guilt to this as well, obviously):
I know you too well now, Freddie…It’s too late…I know the secret now — this is just a dream, too — you’re not alive — the whole thing is a dream — so fuck off! I want my mother and friends again. I take back every bit of energy I ever gave you. You’re nothing. You’re shit.
Okay, so that’s from the speech Nancy gives to Freddie Krueger at the end of Nightmare on Elm Street, but I think the principle is the same.
As I suspected, according to the Belief-O-Matic quiz, I am 100% Unitarian-Universalist, 96% Secular Humanist, 85% Liberal Quaker (?), and 79% Neo-Pagan (and I don’t even own any cloaks!). Going all the way down the list, I am 13% Jehovah’s Witness. I think these percentages refers to the number of beliefs I share with these particular schools of thought. I try to take the quiz every so often, to see if my total score changes over time. At some point a few years ago I scored higher as a Neo-Pagan than a UU, but I’ve been consistently UU most of the time. I’m only 66% “Nontheist“–not sure what that means. I’m not changing the name of the blog.
Some more food for thought from this guy’s report from YearlyKos:
[P]hysicist Sean Carroll of Caltech and Cosmic Variance addressed a vastly different subject that, nevertheless, led him back to a similar theme. Sean’s talk was about, well, the nature of the universe. Mystery solved: It turns out that it’s roughly 5% stuff like us, 25% “dark matter,” and 70% “dark energy.” Or as Sean joked: “The good news is that we understand a lot about the universe. The bad news is that it makes no sense.”
But even as Sean gave us a complete and highly entertaining tour of reality, he hit on a much broader theme. The latest research in cosmology suggests that the universe is friggin weird. Indeed, there’s probably no bigger blow to the human ego than the fact that because it is of an incomprehensible “dark” nature, “most of the universe can’t even be bothered to interact with you,” as Sean put it. Nevertheless, he concluded that there’s something deeply uplifting about a way of thinking that allowed us to not only uncover but embrace this jaw-dropper of an inconvenient truth — something that we would never have expected to find, but that becomes inescapable once you survey all the evidence. And by the same token, Sean pointed out that there’s something rather shallow and small about an outlook that can’t be bothered to confront facts of this unsettling nature.
One problem I always had with my religious upbringing and much of religious thought nowadays (and I know this does not apply to everyone) is the way it encourages complacency–God/Jesus/Etc. loves you, and that is all you need to know. If there is a God(s), He has been incredibly busy, and there is much more of his creation to be admired than we could possibly imagine. It at least puts sporting events into their much broader persepctive.
From the Department of Why’d You Become a Pharmacist Anyway? comes this story (actually the NYT via TFN):
SEATTLE (AP) — Pharmacists have sued Washington state over a new regulation that requires them to sell emergency contraception, also known as the “morning-after pill.”
In a lawsuit filed in federal court Wednesday, a pharmacy owner and two pharmacists say the rule that took effect Thursday violates their civil rights by forcing them into choosing between “their livelihoods and their deeply held religious and moral beliefs.”***
Under the new state rule, pharmacists with personal objections to a drug can opt out by getting a co-worker to fill an order. But that applies only if the patient is able to get the prescription in the same pharmacy visit.
Sold as Plan B, emergency contraception is a high dose of the drug found in many regular birth-control pills. It can lower the risk of pregnancy by as much as 89 percent if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex.
I’ll just ask a few questions that flow from logical extensions of what I presume to be the pharmacists’ reasoning. First question: can a pharmacist who is also a Christian Scientist refuse to dispense any medication, preferring prayer instead? Or how about this: If a pharmacist refuses to dispense Plan B to a woman who had been raped, and she ends up having to carry the child to term, can the pharmacist be held responsible for child support payments? I ask this because (1) presumably the child’s biological father would be in prison and therefore unable to make money for child support, and (2) most state laws put a child’s best interests over the interests of the parents or other responsible parties and someone has to support the child.
Or is it just that life begins at conception and ends at birth for these pharmacists?
I had no idea that this was in the Bill of Rights of the Texas Constitution:
Article 1 – BILL OF RIGHTS
Section 4 – RELIGIOUS TESTS
No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being. (Emphasis added)
Other states do this, too, although these clauses tend to not stand up to court challenges.
Still, why risk it? Should I ever run for office, I shall declare my faith in the Invisible Pink Unicorn:
The story about the Hindu offering a prayer in the Senate has probably been talked to death by now, but I feel that it is appropriate to note that Washington is not in flames one day after the prayer was offered. The prayer did not occur without incident, of course:
WASHINGTON — A Hindu clergyman made history Thursday by offering the Senate’s morning prayer, but only after police officers removed three shouting protesters from the visitors’ gallery.
Rajan Zed, director of interfaith relations at a Hindu temple in Reno, Nev., gave the brief prayer that opens each day’s Senate session. As he stood at the chamber’s podium in a bright orange and burgundy robe, two women and a man began shouting “this is an abomination” and other complaints from the gallery.
Police officers quickly arrested them and charged them disrupting Congress, a misdemeanor. The male protester told an AP reporter, “we are Christians and patriots” before police handcuffed them and led them away.
For several days, the Mississippi-based American Family Association has urged its members to object to the prayer because Zed would be “seeking the invocation of a non-monotheistic god.”
Now that these three self-styled “Christians and patriots” have utterly embarrassed themselves, their religion, and anyone claiming the title “patriot,” I have a few questions for them.
1. Is your objection to the prayer based specifically on the fact that it is Hindu in nature, or is it a more general objection to its “non-monotheistic” nature?
2. If your objection is to the “non-monotheism” of the prayer, what is/are your primary concern(s) about it? E.g., are you concerned about angering the one true God, or are you concerned that, as a result of “non-monotheistic” prayer, God will get confused?
3. Would any monotheistic prayer be acceptable? Christian? Jewish? Muslim? Sikh? Pastafarian?
I await your reply.
