Category Archives: Belief

What I’m Reading, August 28, 2014

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Georgia man shoots self in hand outside bar, bullet kills nearby woman, Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes, August 18, 2014

The man will be charged with “involuntary manslaughter.” Though if you ask me, taking a gun to a bar makes it pretty voluntary. I mean, if you get drunk and you have a gun on you, you assume the risk that you may fuck up and shoot yourself in the hand or “accidentally” shoot another person. You weigh the risks and you decide which is more important to you, and if you err on the side of “I’d rather have my gun with me, I will assume that risk” then you need to take responsibility for your choices.

Scarborough: ‘Who Would Put An Uzi In The Hands Of A Nine Year Old Girl?’ Susie Madrak, Crooks & Liars, August 27, 2014

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Thanks Be to Doctors

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It has become something of a cliché to note when a person of faith, after making a recovery from a horrific disease, thanks their deity of choice but fails to mention the doctors, nurses, scientists, and countless others1 who undoubtedly played a part. In the case of the doctor who has essentially been cured of Ebola after receiving treatment at Emory University in Atlanta, the sentiment that God saved his life strikes me as….well, adjectives honestly fail me.

First of all, if it was God’s doing, why did he have to leave Liberia and come to Atlanta, and why did he need an experimental serum?2 It’s possible that God played a part in this, but the serum definitely did. Second, the same observation3 always comes up in these scenarios, via Ed Brayton this time: Continue reading →

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A Right to an Education

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One way to interpret the decision in El Paso ISD v. McIntyre is to say that the Texas Court of Appeals for the Eighth District held that home-school kids have a right to some basic level of education, or that parents who home-school their kids have an obligation to teach them something.

It’s not at all that straightforward, though (is it ever?) The court’s decision was largely based on procedural issues, with a considerable amount of attention given to whether the McIntyres had “exhausted their administrative remedies.” In plain English, people have to go through an administrative procedure before filing certain types of lawsuits, including a suit against a government entity. In this type of case, the process would require a complaint to a school administrator, followed by the superintendent, followed by the school board.

The school district asked the appeals court to rule that the trial court lacked jurisdiction over the case because the plaintiffs went to court before going through the required administrative process. The appellate court agreed.

The facts of the case, as depicted by the appellate court, make it tempting to hope that this decision will have a far-reaching impact on the more extreme forms of religious homeschooling. The McIntyres sound, uh, interesting: Continue reading →

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Virginity

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Even some evangelical Christians (specifically, evangelical Christian women) are starting to think it’s overrated.

One could be tempted to hope this will mean the end to memes like this:

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Two out of three people on the meme site seem to get it:

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origami_isopod gets it:

My phone is an expensive and important material object and not a useless social construct put in place to shame and commodify women.

RompahRolleh gets it:

It means we’re finally on our way to shedding a social stigma used to shame people for sex and maintaining support for people who’ve lost important things like phones with their ability to communicate and hold contacts.

phattytenorio, not so much:

we live in a world where material things are much important than those once in a life time experience, we blind ourselves not knowing which has greater importance.

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What I’m Reading, July 30, 2014

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Can We Just Be Honest, For Once? BooMan, Booman Tribune, July 28, 2014

I love how this country devises new ways to always avoid taking responsibility for its past mistakes. Did we torture people to death for no good reason? Oh well, we can’t admit it or our soldiers deployed overseas will be put at risk. This is why we never saw many of the more appalling photos from Abu Ghraib. It would have inflamed international opinion and made people want to kill our troops.

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[L]et’s stop being idiots and admit that people already are killing our people because of what we did and that the best way to assure that our people don’t do it again is to just be fucking honest, for once, about what was done in our name.

How Did the GOP Turn Into Such a Bunch of Clowns? Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, July 24, 2014

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What I’m Reading, July 29, 2014

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Religious Exemptions and Public Policy: Freedom to Discriminate, Genevieve Cato, Burnt Orange Report, July 26, 2014

Key to the legal fight to allow discrimination under the guise of religious freedom is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which, under Justice Alito, has become the primary tool for justifying these rulings of religious exemptions. It was also the basis for a ruling by a Texas judge in December, when she determined that three religious universities in Texas should not be required to cover methods of birth control they believe cause abortions.

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The Catholic bishops had great success with what are called “conscience clauses,” which are laws created to allow certain employees to refuse service if it violates their religious belief. The most widely-used example of this is allowing pharmacists to refuse to sell birth control to consumers if it is against their religion. But this is completely counter to the way many Catholics understand the concept of religious conscience in the first place. “Individuals have conscience,” Smith explained, “not institutions.” Further, conscience is not about enforcing your beliefs on another person by refusing to sell someone their medical prescription. It is an individual journey for each Catholic person. This is why Smith refuses to use the term “conscience clause” and instead calls them what they are: “refusal clauses.” [Emphasis in original.]

Face It, Women: The NFL Does Not Give a Shit About You, Erin Gloria Ryan, Jezebel, July 26, 2014 Continue reading →

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What I’m Reading, July 23, 2014

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The Barbarism of ISIL, the Taliban and Wahhabism and collapse of hegemonic ideology, Ian Welsh, ianwelsh.net, July 19, 2014

Don’t use barbarians as your proxies. Saudi Wahhabism and its offshoots is fundamentally in opposition to secular Western enlightenment society. Doing business with such people undermines the core ethics of our own system of ideology.

This does not mean neo-con style perma war. It means showing that our ideology produces better outcomes for them than their own ideology does. Through the fifties and even into the seventies, secularism rose in the world because it was seen as providing better outcomes. It was constantly undermined by the actions of the United States in overthrowing democratic governments they didn’t like. Noticing that the West didn’t believe in its own ideology (at least not for Muslims, and today not even for its own citizens), and that they could not share in the prosperity of secular democracy and socialistic capitalism, is it any wonder that many turned to another strong ideology?

Not every international crisis is about Obama, Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 21, 2014 Continue reading →

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What I’m Reading, July 22, 2014

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Why don’t these ‘Women Against Feminism’ get their sweet asses back in the kitchen? Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes, July 15, 2014

I say, if you’re a woman opposed to feminism, then you should damn well put your money where your mouth is. Stay the hell home and have babies, why don’t you? Don’t vote. Don’t wear pants. Don’t spit in the face of everything feminism has given you and then continue to take advantage of the fruits of that labor. You’re like spoiled children complaining about your parents while living off of a trust fund they gave you.

Women Who are Ambivalent about Women Against Women Against Feminism, Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess, July 21, 2014 Continue reading →

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What I’m Reading, July 16, 2014

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Right-wing “populism” is a joke: Poor-bashing, immigrant-hating and a revolting agenda, Heather Digby Parton, Salon, July 10, 2014

There are some areas of agreement among the left and right populists. They are both hostile to the “wealthy bipartisan elite” although for somewhat different reasons. It’s possible there could be some common legislative ground if both sides were sincere in their desire to rein in money in politics. But Sarah Palin’s words speak of a different priority — the visceral hostility toward immigrants and the obvious belief that they and other poor people are at the root of “workers’” problems. One certainly hopes that the poor and immigrant populations aren’t seen as chips in a negotiating session on these issues, but it wouldn’t be the first time that such devil’s bargains were made.

The real impediment to any agreement is the fact that most of the populist right is being funded and informed by the same wealthy interests they claim are destroying America with their immigrant-loving ways. These wealthy interests are actually less concerned about keeping their cheap immigrant labor (there are many ways of skinning that cat) than they are about the fact that the Republican Party is in grave danger of locking itself out of the executive branch for generations if it is seen as being overtly hostile to Latinos. They’ve invested a lot of time and money in the GOP and they do not wish to lose their grip on power simply because Sarah Palin and her friends don’t like immigrants. But there’s not much they can do about it — they’ve been stoking this right-wing populist base for decades now and that fire is now burning out of control.

Obama and the imperial presidency meme, Steve King, Death and Taxes, July 11, 2014

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What I’m Reading, July 15, 2014

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How Humanism Helps With Depression — Except When It Doesn’t, Greta Christina, Greta Christina’s Blog, July 9, 2014

As regular readers may know, I’ve been diagnosed with clinical depression. My form of it is chronic and episodic: I’m not depressed all the time, I’m not even depressed most of the time, but I’ve had episodes of serious depression intermittently throughout my adult life. I had a very bad bout of it starting about a year and a half ago. I’m pulling out of it now, but my mental health is still somewhat fragile, I still have to be extra careful with my self-care routines, and I still have relapses into fairly bad episodes now and then. And I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to be a humanist with depression, and how these experiences intertwine.

For the most part, my humanism helps. For one thing, I don’t experience any religious guilt—or religious anger—over my depression. I don’t have any sense that I’m letting down my god, that I’m doing something horrible to him by feeling glum and crappy about this wonderful gift of life he’s given me. I don’t have any sense that my god is letting me down. I don’t think my depression is divine punishment or some sort of obscure lesson, and I’m not racking my brains trying to figure out what I did to deserve this. I accept that my depression is a medical condition, and I have it because of genetics, early environmental influences, and other causes and effects in the physical universe.

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” Judge Richard Kopf, Hercules and the umpire, July 11, 2014 Continue reading →

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