Please Save My Marriage From The Gays, Ex-Senator Santorum

But before I get into that, first off, I apologize for the lack of posting lately. I just haven't had the time or the energy these last two months to be as productive as I would have liked. Okay, end of apology.

As I have stated in the past, one of my main sources of inspiration for posts on this blog are solicitations I get in the mail from right wing Christian organizations.

The latest piece of nonsense I have gotten comes from the National Organization for Marriage. The solicitation comes in the form of a hyperbole filled letter from Republican ex-Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

What follows are excerpts from Santorum's letter (in manly blue colored text, of course), followed by my responses in faggy lavender.

My friend, I've never come to you with a more urgent message: we must act NOW to protect marriage.

First off, asshole, I'm not your friend. Second, my marriage, the 10th anniversary of which I will be celebrating next week, is doing just fine. I do not require your "protection."

In Iowa and Vermont, an out-of-control court and an out-of-control legislature have forced same-sex marriage on unwilling voters and New Hampshire and other New England states are in the fights of their lives to protect marriage.

Gosh, there's a lot of lunacy packed into that one sentence. For openers, I can't help but notice that whenever a court or a legislature or agency goes against the wishes of religious conservatives, these institutions are described as being "out-of-control" or "out of touch." And New England states are in the "fights of their lives"? You can almost picture the streets of New England's capital cities littered with dead bodies and crumbling buildings like Berlin in the spring of 1945, as the last die-hard gay marriage opponents desperately fire their panzerfausts at the unstoppable lumbering T-43 tanks of the tyrannical gay marriage lobby, while Rick Santorum and Maggie Gallagher exhort their supporters to fight to the death over the loud speakers.

With one stroke of the pen, President Obama could sign into law a bill that allows judges in one state to impose gay marriage on 47 other states. (Bolded and underlined in the original.)

That's another thing I have noticed about these people. They always try to frame the issue of marriage equality to make it look like it is an imposition on the rest of us. Listen, the only way gay marriage can be imposed on you is if you are forced to marry another person of the same gender as you against your will. You know, the way the daughters of kings and nobles of old were married off against their will to cement alliances or in exchange for territory, all with the blessings of the church, of course.

Will you join me, Dr. James Dobson, and thousands of other people of faith who support the National Organization for Marriage? Together, we can stop those who would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. (Bold in original)

No, I won't.

I was in the Senate chamber on that historic day back in 1996 when an overwhelming majority of Senators and Congressman came together to pass the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which is the ONLY federal law that protects marriage as the union of husband and wife.

Yes, you were in the Senate chamber on that day. And now you're not, because you lost your bid for re-election. There's democracy in action for ya!

DOMA makes sure that four judges based in Boston or San Francisco cannot impose gay marriage on the rest of us. It also makes sure that taxpayers like you and me cannot be forced by judges or gay marriage activists to subsidize same-sex unions as if they were just traditional marriages.

Here we go again with this "impose" bullshit. And guess what Ricky Boy, gays pay taxes too! By the way you describe it, you would almost think that every homosexual in America is living large on the public dole like Ronald Reagan's mythical Welfare Queen. Maybe gay Americans don't feel they should be forced to subsidize the multiple marriages of such bastions of conservative morality as the thrice married Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.

As I sat in the Senate that day I can remember what an extraordinary moment it was: How proud you and I could be of the way Americans of every party and creed came together to to protect our common sense understanding of marriage. Even Bill Clinton signed DOMA into law-that's how broad and powerful the bipartisan consensus for marriage is.

You came together? What, did you all have some kind of circle jerk in Congress that day? As for Bill Clinton, he was a president faced with Republican control of both houses of Congress. Of course he signed it into law. It would have been too politically costly for him not to have signed it. He's a politician and that is what politicians do. In 1996, I thought the idea of same-sex marriage was taking things too far, as much as I considered myself pro-gay rights at the time. But you know what, Ricky? People change their minds over time on some issues. Sometimes it takes decades. Other times it is just a matter of a few years. It's what Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion calls the changing moral zeitgeist. So, you can keep looking back on the passage of DOMA with fond nostalgia all you want, but it is not 1996 anymore.

Marriage is a sacred union of male and female.

Not entirely. A marriage is not inherently sacred. The sanctity of a marriage rests on the level of commitment between the participants in the marriage. If one or both spouses routinely engages in affairs outside of their marriage, or they just plain don't love each other anymore, then there is nothing sacred at all about their marriage.

Marriage should never be turned into a politicized plaything that powerful politicians misuse to placate their clamorous partisan bases.

I guess Ricky's irony meter was broken when he wrote that line.

Not while you and I have a breath left in our bodies, right? (Bolded in original)

Good grief! Here we go with the overwrought rhetoric again.

That's right, while we are tending our jobs, going to church, and raising our families, a handful of wealthy gay men are plotting to use their giant fortunes to reshape the entire American political landscape in their own image.

Yeah, because we all know gays don't have jobs, don't go to church, and don't help take care of family members. And wealthy gay men using their money to help promote gay rights? Gosh, the nerve of them. How dare they lend their financial support to causes that they believe in? After all, it's not like wealthy conservative white men never use their fortunes to support conservative causes!

You and I and millions of other Americans know that we don't want courts telling us our views of marriage are just old-fashioned bigotry.

Okay, as an ordinary American citizen, I will tell you then. It is old-fashioned bigotry.

We want and expect respect for marriage as an ideal because the ideal for children is a mother and a father united by bonds of matrimony.

Yes, when all else fails, THINK OF THE CHILDREN! Does this mean that Santorum opposes heterosexual marriage for couples that are well beyond child bearing age? After all, last year my 67 year old uncle got married to the 65 year old woman he met after his first wife died from cancer 9 years ago. Not all marriages are about children. But since Santorum wants to drag kids into the equation, is he seriously suggesting that children raised in a heterosexual marriage where one or both of the parents is addicted to drugs or alcohol, or is abusive or neglectful, is better than a child raised by same-sex parents who are loving and make a decent income? Mind you, I am not saying that every same-sex couple that wants to raise children will make the best parents. But we all read of plenty of examples in the news of heterosexual couples wherein one parent leaves children in the car of a mall parking lot while he or she goes shopping, or who takes the child with them while attempting to purchase heroin or crystal meth from a street dealer.

What matters is not whether the couple is heterosexual, gay, or alternatively, a single parent household. What matters is the level of love and commitment of the parents or parent, gay or straight.

Marriage is a gift from God, a sacred bond.

Uh, no it's not. It is a human institution that has been dressed up in the garb of religion.

Marriage is not at all like racism, it is not founded on hatred, and we will NOT accept in silence these BIG LIES endlessly repeated to our children and our grandchildren.

Wow, what stupidity! Who is saying that marriage is like racism or that it is founded on hatred? And opposing same-sex marriage is obviously not racism, so Ricky is getting overly emotional here. But the attempts by Santorum and religious conservatives to demonize the gay marriage movement is based on a foundation of bigotry. What gays who have been in monogamous relationships for many years are asking for is that they be accorded the same rights as two heterosexual senior citizens who can lawfully marry. Does it mean that every same-sex marriage will be a paragon of domestic bliss? Absolutely not. As we all know, nobody is perfect.

We are eached called to "faith, hope and love." It is the fuel for our battles with the forces of hate who seek (in the name of tolerance!) to silence God's own truth.

It is not "God's own truth" that you are advocating. What you are advocating is what you choose to believe is the truth of a god that was created by somebody in the Middle East thousands of years ago. The collections of books in the Bible are not some objective truth handed down from on high, but rather the subjective beliefs of the people who wrote them.

And don't forget: we need your prayers, too.

You know what, Ricky? I just might pray for you. Because, as an atheist, I know that my prayers for your success will not be answered nor will they improve your chances for success in any way.

Won't you take a stand for marriage and give today?

The only marriage I can take a stand for is my own, and I will try to give my best to my marriage every day.

God bless you, Rick Santorum.

Yeah, and fuck you too!

David Carradine, R.I.P.

A Step In the Right Direction for Kuwait

First off, apologies for the lack of posting here the past three weeks. I just couldn't seem to find the time to plant my ass in front of my computer and crank out some posts. I hope to get back in the saddle again soon.

Anyway, I meant to do a post about this several days ago when I first read about it, but thought I would give it a belated mention. In a positive turn in Kuwait, women (four of them, in fact) were elected to this Arab Gulf state's parliament for the first time in its history. Since I devote not a few posts on this blog decrying the unequal status of women in many Muslim states, including this post last year when I decried that not a single woman candidate for parliament in Kuwait was elected last year, it is only right that I highlight the good news as well.

The Fit Has Hit The Shan in Pakistan

Read all about it here at the BBC Online, or a host of other places.

From the International Red Cross Committee:

The ICRC said that although figures remain unverifiable at this stage, reports indicated that up to 500,000 Pakistanis have been recently displaced by conflict in Dir, Buner and Swat.

The ICRC and the Pakistan Red Crescent Society are currently marshaling their resources to be able to provide 120,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) affected by the fighting with food and essential relief items. The ICRC also hopes to be able to provide basic heath care for about 30,000 displaced people. Its recently inaugurated 60-bed surgical hospital in Peshawar is scaling up its capacity to be able to receive up to 100 weapon-wounded patients at a time. The organization has also been in daily contact with hospitals in Timmergarah, Mardan and Swat to find out about their needs and discuss possible ways of providing support.

It looks like the Pakistani government has finally realized you can't make deals with the Taliban fundamentalists. They have to be eradicated before they metastasize like a cancer throughout the country. Unfortunately, a lot of innocent Pakistani civilians are being displaced as a result of the crackdown by the Pakistani army in the Swat Valley region.

Now, there is no shortage of worthy causes in the world that need your help. But I would urge you to make a donation, if you are financially able, to the International Red Cross so that they can help the people of Pakistan who are being turned into refugees in their own country. You can make an online donation here. There is a drop-down screen where you can select Pakistan as your donation choice. I just made a donation a moment ago, as I wouldn't ask anyone to do so unless I had done so myself. Thank you for your consideration.

They Got Him!

No, not Osama bin Laden.

Several weeks ago, I wrote this post titled Speaking of Banks to vent my frustration over how easy it is for any lowlife knucklehead to rob banks.

Well, I just learned that the suspect who inspired the post, one David Graf of Seaford, was caught along with his accomplice, Lauren Becker of Commack. I had suspected as much, as I wrote in my post, "Judging by his targets, he either drives himself around or he has an accomplice, as his targets are scattered throughout the county."

Newsday has his mug shot here. As the text below the photo indicates, "they robbed banks to fuel a drug addiction." I mentioned that in my previous post as well, "It would not surprise me if the suspect in the Plainview robbery was a heroin or other drug addict looking for cash to feed his habit. If that is the case, he is going to keep on committing robberies until he eventually slips up and gets caught." Of course, anybody could have guessed that.

Graf and Becker are just two more sad examples of the tragedy of drug addiction. They not only hurt those around them, but they waste their own lives as well, all in pursuit of that next high.

The Spread of Christianity Part 3 - The Sacred Oak of Geismar

In what has become something of an annual ritual, conservative media outlets like Fox News claim that there is a War on Christmas in this country. One of the pieces of evidence offered is that some people use the greeting "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Call me insensitive if you will, but you have to be pretty darned thinned skinned to consider such an innocuous greeting as some form of oppression. After all, if the forces of secularism and atheism in this country were really waging a War on Christmas in this country, you would expect to be seeing large scale vandalism of manger displays, the smashing of stained glass windows of churches and so forth. Of course, we thankfully don't see these things and I would be the first to condemn such actions if they were happening.

But if you look at the history of Christianity during the late Roman period into the early Middle Ages, you will see that Christians quite literally waged a violent war against paganism. Of course, some Christians will retort that Christians were persecuted by pagan Roman emperors before the time of Constantine. And that of course is quite true. But these persecutions were deliberate acts of government policy, rather than instances of pagan priests themselves disrupting Christian church services.

One of the earliest examples of a confrontational and aggressive Christianity was Martin, a bishop of Tours in the late 4th century. Richard Fletcher, in The Barbarian Conversion, quotes Martin's biographer Sulpicius:

In a village named Levroux, however, when [Martin] wished to demolish in the same way a temple which had been made very rich by its superstitious cult, he met with resistance from a crowd of pagans and was driven off with some injuries to himself. He withdrew, therefore, to a place in the neighbourhood where for three days in sackcloth and ashes, continuously fasting and praying, he besought Our Lord that the temple which human hands had failed to demolish might be destroyed by divine power.

Then suddenly two angels stood before him, looking like heavenly warriors, with spears and shields. They said that the Lord had sent them to rout the rustic host and give Martin protection, so that no one should hinder the destruction of the temple. He was to go back, therefore, and carry out faithfully the work he had undertaken. So he returned to the village and, while crowds of pagans watched in silence, the heathen sanctuary was razed to its foundations and all its altars and images reduced to powder.

The sight convinced the rustics that it was by divine decree that they had been stupefied and overcome with dread, so as to offer no resistance to the bishop; and nearly all of them made profession of faith in the Lord Jesus, proclaiming with shouts before all that Martin's God should be worshipped and the idols ignored, which could neither save themselves nor anyone else.

Adds Sulpicius, "He immediately built a church or monastery at every place where he destroyed a pagan shrine."

Fletcher notes, "Archaeological discoveries have furnished confirmation of the destruction of sites of pagan worship at this period which, in the words of Paulinus of Nola, was 'happening throughout Gaul'. At a temple of Mercury at Avallon in Burgundy pagan statues were smashed and piled up in a heap of rubble: the coin series at the site ends in the reign of Valentinian I (364-375), which suggests that the work of the destruction occurred shortly afterwards."

Does this remind anyone of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001?

We see such behavior manifested again in the early 8th century by one Boniface of Wessex. In about the year 723, the bishop received a commission from Pope Gregory to lead a mission to the region of Germany known as Thuringia.

Fletcher again, "Pagans 'not yet cleansed' were first encountered at Geismar, where there was a sacred oak tree. It is possible there may have been there 'a pagan shrine of more than local significance'. In a brave act of public Christian assertion Boniface felled the oak. 'At the sight of this extraordinary spectacle the heathens who had been cursing ceased to revile and began, on the contrary, to believe and bless the Lord.'"

Such is the fame of Boniface, that today, the town of Crediton in Wales, boasts of it being his birthplace on its tourism web site. The web site notes, without irony, that "He boldly tackled superstition, including the felling of Thor's sacred Oak at Geismar by his own hand in front of hostile tribesmen, and laid the foundation of a flourishing new church." (Emphasis added) An engraving depicting the event appears at the top of this post.

As for Boniface, he eventually met a fate that was not all that different from the Geismar Oak. In 754, he was a member of a party on the Frisian coast, which Fletcher describes as "well beyond the protecting reach of Frankish power. There they were awaiting the arrival of the recently baptized for confirmation. Instead they were surprised...by a gang of seaborne predators attracted by the prospect of loot. In the struggle that ensued we are told that the elderly missionary tried to ward off the blows of his assailants by using a book as a shield: to no avail; Boniface and his companions were slaughtered."

While Boniface was described thereafter as achieving martyrdom, it appears that rather than being killed for his faith, he was simply killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. At any rate, the murder of Boniface did not halt the westward march of Christianity, which will be the subject of Part 4: The Saxon Capitulary.

Drops of Water in A Water Jar Part 1 - Composting

The title of this post was inspired from a verse from the Buddhist text The Dhammapada, which reads in full, "Hold not a deed of little worth, thinking 'this is little to me.' The falling of drops of water will in time fill a water-jar. Even so the wise man becomes full of good although he gather it little by little."

Likewise, when many individuals each do a small amount of good they can together accomplish a great deal of good. In the first of what I hope will be a regular series of posts on this blog, I want to discuss the benefits of composting and how it applies to this philosophy.

This past summer, I decided to start composting my lawn and leaf waste. When I thought about it, I realized it was extremely wasteful to spend money on several boxes of plastic lawn and leaf bags to bag grass clippings and leaves, haul them to the curb for trash collection and have them take up space in landfills. So, with a quick trip to a nearby Home Depot, I obtained the basic supplies needed for under $20 and went about setting aside a corner in my backyard for the compost bin. Above is a picture of the bin I shot today.

What are the practical benefits of composting? Well, for starters, I am looking forward to starting a vegetable garden this spring, so I hope to be able to generate enough useable compost to mix with top soil. By composting my grass and leaf cuttings, I am also saving some money that would be spent on lawn and leaf bags. But the benefits extend beyond that.

As I wrote in the paragraph above, composting yard waste means less of it takes up space in our landfills. If more people with available yard space for a compost bin did the same, it would have a multiplier effect. From the Environmental Protection Agency's web site on composting, "Yard trimmings and food residuals together constitute 23 percent of the U.S. waste stream."

Mass composting of yard waste could also help reduce fossil fuel use. When homeowners leave upwards of a dozen bags of raked leaves by the curb during the height of the autumn season, garbage collection trucks have to stop and idle while the workers pick up the bags and toss them into the back of the truck. While we are probably talking maybe a matter of a few seconds of idle time, when you multiply that amount by the hundreds of homes on each truck's collection route, the amount of fuel wasted really starts to add up.

In addition to composting grass clippings and leaves, table scraps also make a valuable component of a compost pile. I started adding things like banana peels, apple cores and other fruit and vegetable scraps several months ago. Instead of tossing in the items individually, I purchased a small pail with a lid that pops open when you step on the foot pedal and a supply of bags made from biodegradable cornstarch. Above is a picture of one of the bags filled with banana peels and such.

Another thing I did late last autumn after doing some research about composting was to toss in some worms that I came across when I was raking and vacuuming. Recently, when I have been churning around the pile after receiving rainfall, I was surprised to see that at least several of the worms in the pile were still alive after so many months had passed.

As I am still quite the novice when it comes to composting, it remains to be seen how successful it will turn out with my planned vegetable garden. Regardless of that, I can at least take some satisfaction in knowing that I am doing a little bit of good by adding less waste to our landfills and helping to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. If you believe that these are worthwhile goals and you are able to compost your yard waste and table scraps, then I hope you will help fill up that water-jar.

You Go, Afghan Ladies!

Poor Afghan Women Brainwashed by Western anti-Islamic propaganda

I'm on my lunchbreak now and checked the New York Times online a moment ago to catch up on current events, and wanted to immediately share this article with you. (Registration required). It is thrilling to read about these brave Afghan ladies demonstrating against the "marital rape" law, though it is equally disheartening to see the vitriolic fury their protest march generated among the fanatically conservative minions of Kabul.

The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.

“Get out of here, you whores!” the men shouted. “Get out!”

“We want our rights!” one of the women shouted, turning to face them. “We want equality!”

But the march carried on anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital on Wednesday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.

With the Afghan police keeping the mob at bay, the women walked two miles to Parliament, where they delivered a petition calling for the law’s repeal.

The women who protested Wednesday began their demonstration with what appeared to be a deliberately provocative act. They gathered in front of the School of the Last Prophet, a madrassa run by Ayatollah Asif Mohsini, the country’s most powerful Shiite cleric. He and the scholars around him played an important role in the drafting of the new law.

“We are here to campaign for our rights,” one woman said into a loudspeaker. Then the women held their banners aloft and began to chant.

The reaction was immediate. Hundreds of students from the madrassa, most but not all of them men, poured into the streets to confront the demonstrators.

“Death to the enemies of Islam!” the counterdemonstrators cried, encircling the women. “We want Islamic law!”

The women stared ahead and kept walking.

The end of the article features one of the clerics of the madrassa, a Mohammed Hussein Jafaari.

The article quotes him as saying, “We Afghans don’t want a bunch of NATO commanders and foreign ministers telling us what to do.”

Oh yeah? Well, you know what Mr. Jafaari? A lot of Afghan women don't want a bunch of perverted Islamic male scholars telling them what to do!

I really wish there was something substantial we could do to help these ladies achieve the gender equality that they deserve. For all of their bravery, sadly they appear to be vastly outnumbered. Off the top of my head, one thing we could do, even if it does not solve the problem, is to offer asylum to any Afghan woman who wants to flee the country to escape the law. One counterargument to that idea though is that if we make it easier for the more independent minded women to leave Afghanistan, that will just make it harder for the remainder who stay behind. But I fear that the number of women who will push back is not enough as it is, and therefore it would not make much of a difference if they stayed, except to get themselves killed. Besides, if we can get enough women to leave, maybe it will create a shortage of wives and these tribalistic misogynystic assholes won't be able to have children to pass on the madness to another generation.

The Real Housewives of Afghanistan

An Afghan Man Will Never Need Her Permission to Cum Inside Her

A number of atheist bloggers have already expressed their outrage about Afghanistan's "marital rape" law, along with even greater numbers of human rights and feminist activists and supporters.

Of course, supporters of the law claim that it is a whole lot of fuss being raised about nothing. Below are some excerpts from this article on Al Jazeera English online.

A top Afghan cleric [Mohammad Asif Mohseni] who backs a law that critics say would allow marital rape has dismissed the outcry the legislation has generated in the West.

The law states that "it is essential for the woman to submit to the man's sexual desire" and says a husband can demand sex with his wife every four days, unless she is ill or would be harmed by intercourse.

Surrounded by supporters, Mohseni unfurled reams of paper with hundreds of women's signatures and thumbprints backing the law.

He also said much of the uproar had come from people misinterpreting the law and that a woman could refuse sex with her husband for many reasons beyond illness, including fasting for Ramadan, preparing for a pilgrimage, menstruating, or recovering from giving birth.

Wow, it looks like we really were overreacting! Hundreds of Afghani women support this legislation. And women can refuse sex if they are preparing for a pilgrimage, or for the entire month of Ramadan.

But seriously.

Yeah, sure you can claim that hundreds of Afghan women support a law that legislates that a woman must submit to her husband's sexual desires every four days. But no one, man or woman, has the right to dictate to another woman when and if she must have sex with her husband. Call me a radical, but I support the idea of full equality of the sexes and that women have the right to bodily autonomy, including whether to terminate a pregnancy and if, when and under what conditions a man's penis gets to penetrate her vagina. And how many of those women's fingerprints in support of the new law were supplied under coercion?

Maybe it's just me, but the idea of having sex with a woman against her will strikes me as barely a step above masturbation. If she is just going to lie there while she waits for Abdul to get it over with, Abdul might as well just stick his dick in a sex doll. From what I have read, they're getting more lifelike all the time, as demonstrated by the picture at the top of this post.

Or how about this? If you want to have sex with your wife, Mister Afghan stud, how about bringing home your wife a box of chocolates or some nice flowers? How about helping out with the household chores once in a while? Buy her some perfume and tell her how beautiful she looks. It might increase your chances of her actually wanting to do the nasty with you. On the other hand, If you need a piece of legislation passed by parliament to get laid, then you're a really pathetic guy.

There's always a chance that Afghan President Hamid Karzai will force further revisions to the law, but no matter what changes he might wring out of the religious conservatives, it is likely that the principle that a wife must submit sexually to her husband will still be enshrined into the law. Yes, it is completely unacceptable, but there does not seem to be a hell of a lot we can do about it.

John Safran Gets Crucified in the Philippines

Uh oh! I decided to do some follow up reading on John Safran's crucifixion stunt in the Philippines this past Friday, and it looks like he has pissed off a lot of the locals.

From The Australian News comes the latest developments.

DEVOUT Christian followers of Good Friday's crucifixion rituals in the rural Philippines village of Kapitangan were devastated to learn that John Safran's nailing to the cross alongside local penitents was a TV comedy show stunt.

Student Jhoan Caparas, 18, who saw Safran's crucifixion, said his actions had been disrespectful and immoral.

"Why does he want to come here and laugh at us? We don't laugh at his culture and his beliefs. So he should respect ours."

I'm sorry, but what the fuck is there to respect about having yourself nailed to a cross? What a bunch of backwards-ass supersitious weirdos!

Buboy Dionisio, nailed to the cross along with Safran, who was sporting a Monty Python-style wig, said he could not understand why the comedian and his producers had falsely claimed to be making a serious TV show.

The comedian and his crew - believed to be filming for an ABC TV series to be screened this year, John Safran's Race Relations - were threatened with deportation and forced to sign an affidavit pledging not to use footage mocking crucifixion rituals.

Kapitangan Village councillor Cleotilde Gaspar was shocked Safran was making a comedy show because he had "really been crucified with the nails going all the way through his hand".

"But if he is making fun of us and what we do that is very serious for us because for us it is not funny," she said.

Cleotilde Gaspar is right about one thing. What these religious fanatics are doing is not funny. It's sad and pathetic. Even if I were still a Catholic, I would still find what they do abhorrent. After all, isn't the whole point of the Crucifixion that Jesus is supposed to have suffered and died for us, rather than inspiring ersatz imitators?

Breaking News: Jesus Is Still Dead

To all my readers, I want to wish you a Happy Atheist Easter.

For your reading pleasure, here is an article about John Safran joining those wacky Filipinos in getting himself crucified on Good Friday.

King Bhumibol of Thailand Is A Dick

Whatever you do, don't make fun of his silly hat.

To be honest, I don't really have a personal problem with him. I am just expressing my opposition to Thailand's "lese majeste" laws, which makes it a crime to insult the royal family of Thailand.

Now, how serious is this?

From the BBC:

A Thai citizen has been sentenced to 10 years in jail for violating strict laws against insulting the monarchy.

A court in Bangkok said Suwicha Thakho, 34, digitally altered images of King Bhumibol Adulyadej and his family and posted them on the internet.

Thailand's royal family is sheltered from public debate by some of the world's most stringent lese-majeste laws, as the police and army try to suppress what they fear is a rising tide of anti-monarchy sentiment.

One political activist was jailed for six years in November for an anti-monarchy speech she made just a stone's throw from the old royal palace last July.

But this insanity doesn't just apply to Thai citizens. Foreigners in Thailand are also at risk of falling afoul of these laws, no matter how inadvertent the offense might be.

Harry Nicolaides, an Australian writer jailed in Thailand for defaming its monarch, has returned home after being pardoned by the king and set free.

The charges arose from a passage in a largely unknown novel he wrote in 2005, of which only seven of 50 copies printed were ever sold.

Mr Nicolaides was met by his family in Melbourne. He would next see his mother in hospital, his father told reporters.

He told reporters he had been crying for eight hours, having only learnt moments before his flight that his mother had suffered a stroke while he was imprisoned.

"A few hours before that I was informed I had a royal pardon... A few hours before that I was climbing out of a sewerage tank that I fell into in the prison," AP quotes him as saying.

So, in the spirit of irreverence, I invite all readers here, Thai and non-Thai, to insult the royal family...just because it should be your right and because you can.

The Lubavitcher Bus

Well, it was more like a camper really.

Last week a friend and I were walking east from 6th Avenue down 48th Street in Manhattan to eat lunch at a Chinese restaurant. There was this loud and annoying music playing from this long, white camper with a large picture on the side of the late Lubavitcher rebbe Schneerson. Inside were a number of Lubavitchers, an Orthodox Jewish sect, many of them young men bouncing and swaying to the music like some Jewish hip-hop posse.

I said to my friend, "I would rather listen to rap music then this." I shouted at the people in the bus to "turn that crap down," but did so halfheartedly, knowing it was a futile gesture. We crossed the street and went into the Chinese restaurant, and forgot about the Lubavitcher bus.

After lunch, my friend and I walked back towards 6th Avenue and turned left as I intended to walk with her until we got to the corner of 47th Street. And lo and behold, there was the camper, parked on 6th Avenue across the street from my office. Up ahead, I could see two of the Lubavitcher boys accosting men who walked past them on the sidewalk, asking "Are you Jewish?"

Apparently, what these Lubavitchers were engaging in is something called kiruv, which the Wikipedia link describes as "the collective work or movement of Orthodox Judaism that reaches out to non-Orthodox Jews to believe in God, engage in Torah study, and practice the Mitzvot in the hope that they will live according to Orthodox Jewish law. The process and act/s of any Jew becoming more observant of Judaism is called teshuva ("return" in Hebrew) making the "returnee" a baal teshuva ("master of return")."

As my friend and I closed the distance with them, I anticipated that I would be approached by one of the Lubavitcher boys and was ready for them. "Are you Jewish?" one of them asked as I walked near him.

I turned to face him and said "No, I'm an atheist, and you should be too." With that, I turned away and kept on walking with my female friend (apparently, the Lubavitcher males don't address women). She expressed some surprise at what I had said, but I replied to her that once they insert themselves into the public square like that, I am under no obligation to respect the substance of their beliefs. If they have the right to accost me in the street and ask me if I am Jewish, then I have every right to tell that person he shoud be an atheist.

One of these days, if I have the time and the requisite amount of chutzpah, I might identify myself as Jewish to these clowns just to see what they do next. If so, you will be sure to read about it here!

The Rise of Christianity Part 2: It's All About The Women

As I wrote in Part 1 of this series, "in order for the Church to survive and prosper, it needed the Germanic kings who occupied the former Roman territories to convert to Christianity and be baptized in the Church."

Of course, in order to get these Germanic kings to open themselves up to the prospect of conversion to Christianity, the faith had to be presented to them with a pretty face. In other words, the first stage in getting a Germanic king to embrace Christianity was for him to be presented with a Christian bride.

Returning to the Frankish king Clovis, the starting point for his conversion, and the subsequent conversion of the Franks, began with Clotild, his Catholic Burgundian wife. The historian Edward James, in his book The Franks, summarizes the narrative of Gregory of Tours, whose Ten Books of Histories is one of the major source writings for the period.

"Clovis's Burgundian wife Clotild wanted him to agree to baptize their first son, Ingomer. Gregory devises a little sermon for her to preach to her husband, which made the same points that early medieval preachers tended to make to pagans: your gods are bits of stone or wood; they were men, not gods; they set examples of immorality...The child was baptized, and promptly died. Undaunted, Clotild had her second son baptized, and when he too fell ill she prayed and the child recovered: a sign from Heaven."

It was some time afterwards that Clovis allegedly decided to be himself baptized following a battle against the Alemmani, in which he supposedly had called on Jesus Christ for aid and promised to be baptized if he was victorious. The likely story is that Clovis had already considered conversion to Christianity before the battle, but that he needed a suitable pretext before making his intentions public, in the same way that Abraham Lincoln was waiting for the right moment, the repulse of Robert E. Lee at Antietam, to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. After all, when you are a manly Germanic king, you can't expect your people to cast off their old gods just because it will make your wife happy. But Clovis's agreement to be baptized undoubtedly made conversation at the Merovingian family dinner table a lot less contentious.

Following the conversion of the Franks (at least superficially, but more on that in a future post), the Frankish kingdom itself became a new source of royal Christian brides to be dispatched to new pagan kings as part of a strategy to bring them into the community of Christian kingdoms. Thus, a Christian Frankish lady named Bertha was married to Ethelbert of Kent in the latter half of the sixth century. Writes Richard Fletcher in The Barbarian Conversions, "[w]e do know that Bertha's kinsfolk had been able to insist that Ethelbert permit his wife to practise her religion. She came to Kent accompanied by a bishop named Liudhard."

"Bertha would have known of her great-grandmother's part in the conversion of her husband Clovis. She may well have received a hortatory letter reminding her of it...when she went off as a bride to Kent. Her assistance in the conversion of Ethelbert was acknowledged by Pope Gregory in a letter he sent to her in 601."

The story repeats itself with Edwin of Northumbria, who married Ethelburga, a Christian princess from Kent, the aforementioned kingdom of the Christian convert Ethelbert. "Diplomatic presents of rich apparel, gold embroidered, cunningly hinted at the splendid trappings of Christian civilization. Queen Ethelburga was firmly reminded of her duty as wife and queen to bring about Edwin's conversion." Well, it certainly adds a whole new meaning to the phrase 'missionary position'! Edwin finally succumbed and was baptized on Easter Sunday in the year 627.

It seems clear that the marriage of a Christian princess to a pagan king played an important role in getting the king to convert to Christianity. The princess would be accompanied by her own retinue, including her own priest to minister to her and her attendants, thus providing a foothold for the Christian faith in the king's court. As to how much the king's resistance to conversion was broken down by his Christian queen's pleading and cajoling is difficult to say. There were other factors at work of course. By marrying a princess from a Christian kingdom, a pagan king became increasingly drawn into a network of political and trading relations with Christian kingdoms such as the Franks. Ultimately, a pagan king would proclaim his conversion to Christianity and be baptized because he found it to be advantageous to do so. Since there was no aggressively proselytizing alternative faith, and the Catholic Church carried with it the prestige of being a Roman institution, adopting Christianity was a way of formal joining the club of "civilized" nations. And an important first step in the process of conversion was marrying a Christian princess from one of those Christian kingdoms.

Coming soon: The Rise of Christianity Part 3: The Sacred Oak of Geismar

Speaking of Banks...

Why the f%#k is it so easy to rob them?

I was reading this week's issue of the Plainview-Old Bethpage Herald. At the bottom of page three was an article about how Nassau County Robbery Squad detectives are still looking for a bank robbery suspect who robbed a Chase Bank on Old Country Road this past March 23.

The suspect, a white male between the ages of 27 to 32, approximately 5'8" in height, passed a note to the teller demanding money. After being handed the cash, he fled the scene.

The article then lists the following bank robberies he is suspected of carrying out based on photographs taken of him by the bank security cameras:

March 21 @ 12:30 p.m., Washington Mutual Bank at 3345 Hempstead Turnpike in Levittown.

March 21@ 1:55 p.m., Citibank at 670 Merrick Avenue in East Meadow.

March 23 @ 5:04 p.m., at the aforementioned Chase Bank at 1100 Old Country Road in Plainview.

March 26 @ 5:45 p.m., CapitalOne Bank at 1145 Willis Avenue in Albertson.

March 29 @ 1:30 p.m., TD Bank at 4126 Merrick Road in Massapequa.

March 30 @ 7:10 p.m., TD Bank at 416 Central Avenue in Cedarhurst.

As you can see, the suspect was especially ambitious on his first outing on the 21st, robbing two banks close to each other geographically in a narrow time frame. Judging by his targets, he either drives himself around or he has an accomplice, as his targets are scattered throughout the county. I would guess that he figures if he does not confine his robberies to a specific area, it will lessen his chances of being caught.

But back to the question I asked at the beginnning of this post, I have personally never worked in a bank, so I do not know what their procedures are in these situations. If anyone reading this has or currently does work in a bank, I would appreciate your comments. It looks to me though that the policy is for tellers to automatically comply with a request for money under the assumption that the robber is armed. But it strikes me as being way too pathetically easy for any loser or lowlife to walk in and demand money knowing that he or she will make an easy score. I do recall reading a few months ago where one bank robbery was foiled when a teller, in response to a demand for money, laughed at the would-be robber and said "Are you kidding me?" Apparently, that was all it took for the robber to lose his/her nerve and flee.

Now, I don't claim to be an expert on issues of security, but it seems to me that there are plenty of low-tech, commonsense methods that banks can adopt to reduce the number of robberies. How about requiring every person who enters a bank to show a valid identification? Every dance club that serves alcohol requires patrons to show i.d. at the door before entering the premises. Why the fuck can't banks do that? Or, if that is too much trouble, how about requiring everyone who enters the bank to remove their hats or hoods or anything else that obstructs views of their faces and to stand in a spot that enables the security camera to get a clear photograph? The article on the suspect in the Plainview robbery shows two separate photos of him wearing a baseball cap that partially obscures his face.

I understand that there are legitimate concerns about bank robberies turning into violent stand-offs. But it appears the overwhelming majority are like those perpetrated by the aforementioned suspect, a lone, in all likelihood unarmed individual, whose demands for cash made to a teller are meekly complied with. It would not surprise me if the suspect in the Plainview robbery was a heroin or other drug addict looking for cash to feed his habit. If that is the case, he is going to keep on committing robberies until he eventually slips up and gets caught. I just can't help thinking that people like him wouldn't be as successful as they are if banks would be take some proactive security measures.

Please, Don't Do Me Any Favors

At the bottom of the page of the statement for my Money Market Savings Account, the following language appears:

You earned a higher interest rate on your XXXXX Money Market Savings account during this statement period because you had a qualifying XXXXX Better Banking Checking account.

And what was this "higher" interest rate I earned? Drum roll please.........

0.01%!

Last month I earned a whopping eight cents in interest! Whoooey! I wonder what my rate would have been if I did not have the savings account linked to a checking account, 0.00001%? Or maybe it would be a negative number. Of course, this savings account does not constitute the main core of my savings. It's meant to be an easily accessible fund to tap for unbudgeted emergency expenses such as having to get the car repaired or to have an appliance fixed or replaced. But an interest rate of 0.01%? I guess I can understand if that is the best my bank can do under the present circumstances, but it shouldn't act like it's doing me a favor by offering me such a piddling rate.

Thoughts On Overpopulation - Part 1

The April 2009 edition of Free Inquiry magazine has a number of articles addressing the issue of human population numbers and its impact on the environment and ultimately our quality of life. Unfortunately, only one article, by David and Marcia Pimentel, is available online.

The following sentence from the article by the Pimentels jumped out at me:

"To be able to ensure a reasonable standard of living, Americans will have to reduce their population and their consumption of goods and energy by one-half."

Without getting into whether the Pimentels are right or wrong, there is no way, absent genocide or a massive die-off from a lethal pandemic, that the populaton of the United States will ever be reduced to half its present level. Our current population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's population clock, is approximately 306 million. The Census Bureau estimates that as early as 2039 our population will reach 400 million. So, those of us and our descendants who will be alive in 2039 will either have to endure an "unreasonable" standard of living or find a way of maintaining the standard of living that most of us are accustomed to today.

One of the things that makes me, and I suspect many other people, uncomfortable about population control is that it conjures up images of some self-annointed cabal of "experts" deciding how many children can be born and imposing draconian restrictions on us in order to make us live according to what they believe to be the planet's "carrying capacity."

Some environmental activists concerned about the adverse effects of human overpopulation advocate that couples have at best one, and no more than two, children, depending on whether or not the goal is voluntary population reduction or stabilization. Regular readers of this blog know that I am the father of two children. If my wife was the same age as me or younger than me, rather than being six years older than me, we might have tried for a third child and limited ourselves to that. But my wife's biological clock, and the need to maintain our sanity(!), meant that we would have only two children. So, by circumstance, my wife and I are contributing to a replacement level population.

I also happen to be the youngest of three brothers. I was born a year after the publication of Paul Ehrlich's provocative 1968 book The Population Bomb. If my mother and father had heeded the message of Ehrlich's book, I would not be here typing this post right now. Of course, if I didn't exist, 99.999% of humanity wouldn't miss me. But one person who definitely would be negatively impacted by my nonexistence would be my mother. My father died almost three years ago from complications resulting from surgery. As I wrote at the top of this paragraph, I am the youngest of three brothers. Also, as regular readers of this blog will recall, my two older brothers are not, to put it delicately, paragons of responsibility. Therefore, the burden of helping to care for my mother falls pretty much on my shoulders. In fact, my uncle, my mother's brother, contributes more than both of my brothers combined. So, it is safe to say that if I didn't exist, my mom's situation would be much worse than it is. My being alive and responsible makes the difference between my mom being able to live in her own home or living in a nursing home that would rapidly deplete her life savings.

It is a simple fact of life that as most people get older, they expect to be able to rely on at least one of their children to provide them with support and comfort in their later years. I don't doubt that my mom is not the only senior citizen in the United States whose most reliable offspring is the last one who was born. In cases like mine, it is because the other siblings lead troubled lives. In other cases, the first born might have been born retarded or with a serious birth defect, or perhaps might even have died or suffered a crippling injury.

To subordinate the human race to a concept like "carrying capacity" reduces us to just a statistic. Once you do that, then it is not such a big leap to implementing policies to reduce our numbers to fit somebody's calculation of this carrying capacity. If it is so important to reduce our population back down to one billion in the next 50 to 100 years, then why not find a way to introduce some disease into given areas of the world that are perceived as being overpopulated? Why not kill off the elderly? Because the plain, hard truth is that it is not likely that the human race will ever reach a broad consensus across the many nations and ethnicities of which it is comprised to voluntarily reduce its growth by having fewer children, and even if it could, it certainly would not happen within the time frame that the population doomsayers say it needs to be done.

Are there too many people on this planet stressing the Earth's ability to feed us and provide us all with a "reasonable" standard of living? Probably. I will get into that in Part 2. But suffice it to say that even if the answer to that question is yes, we are going to have to find a way to make it work for all of us.

The Spread of Christianity Part 1: In Hoc Signo Vinces

Everyone who is at least vaguely familiar with the history of Christianity and the Roman Empire knows the story. The emperor Constantine, shortly before engaging his rival Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in the year 312, allegedly saw a vision in the sky of the Christian Cross above the words "In Hoc Signo Vinces", Latin for "by this sign, conquer." As the story goes, Constantine had his soldiers mark their shields with the sign of the cross, and they proceeded to defeat Maxentius. Constantine afterwards issued the Edict of Milan, officially putting an end to the persecution of Christians that had reached a crescendo under the reign of his predecessor Diocletian. From there onwards, Christianity embarked on what in hindsight seems to have been its inevitable march from a recognized faith in the empire to the official faith of the empire, the brief speedbump that was Julian's reign notwithstanding.

Constantine's victory and embrace of Christianity, while a major milestone in the history of the religion, was the first of what would prove to be a recognizeable pattern in the rise of the faith into the early Middle Ages. In other words, the spread of the teachings of Jesus Christ owed a great deal to emperors and kings being victorious in battles that resulted in the deaths of other people.

In the wake of the disintegration of the Western Empire in the latter half of the fifth century (which some people mistakenly attribute to Christianity itself), the Catholic Church was the only "Roman" institution that remained. In order for the Church to survive and prosper, it needed the Germanic kings who occupied the former Roman territories to convert to Christianity and be baptized in the Church. Filling the power vacuum left by the collapse of Roman authority in Gaul (modern day France) was the kingdom of the Franks under its aggressively expansionist ruler Clovis.

While the wife of Clovis was a Catholic, Clovis himself was not quite prepared at first to take the plunge. Then, in the thick of battle against the Alamanni in the year 496, Clovis is said to have called upon Jesus Christ and promised to to be baptized if he was victorious. As it turned out, Clovis won the battle and eventually fulfilled his promise to be baptized. His decision was momentous not only for Christianity in general, but for Catholicism in particular, as at that time in history the Catholic Church was in competition with what it deemed to be the heresy of Arianism.

The story would repeat itself in post-Roman Britain. From Richard Fletcher's The Barbarian Conversions, "The contemporary written sources bearing upon the conversion of kings prompt reflection on a number of themes. First, we observe the repeated assurance that acceptance of Christianity will bring victory, wide dominion, fame and riches. This is what Germanic kings wanted to hear, because their primary activity was war." (Text bolded for emphasis)

From the standpoint of the Church, in order to be able to proselytize in a given territory, it needed to curry the favor of the local ruler. If a warrior king could be convinced that his success in battle was due to the support of the Christian god, then that king would allow himself to be baptized and encourage his subjects to follow suit. And struggles with neighboring pagan kings would not simply be a conflict over territory or wealth, but literally a war between the forces of good and evil.

Prior to Constantine's victory at Milvian Bridge, Christianity was more of a grassroots movement. It spread and gained adherents in spite of the position of the Roman government. But from Constantine onward, Christianity became an instrument of state policy. Thus, with the disintegration of Roman governmental authority in Western Europe, the Church sought to continue this pattern by marrying itself to the barbarian kings, which in turn paved the way for spreading the faith to their subjects. What started out as a faith that spread from the bottom-up had turned into a top-down affair that relied on good, old fashioned brute force.

Ooops! I Totally Forgot!

Yeah, that's right. Shame on me. I totally forgot to participate in Earth Hour, wherein from 8:30 to 9:30 local time, participants turn off the power to all nonessential items in their home. To be honest, I meant to. But around 7:30 I had to go to my mom's to fill up her electronic pill dispenser for the following week, pay some of her bills, and take out the trash. Between all that and chatting with her for a short while, all thoughts of dimming lights had vacated my head. I had also neglected to tell my wife, who was home with the kids, so she had no inkling. Not that she would have cared anyway, as she knew nothing about it at all.

Oh well, there's always next year.

Kudos to those who did participate though. While it is just a purely symbolic gesture, its promoters have their heart in the right place. If you can do it, you do. If you can't, or, in my case, you forget, you don't.

What annoys me are these mostly right wing jerkoffs with the maturity of a seventh grader who see the event as an occasion to gleefully turn on ALL of the lights and appliances in their homes out of sheer spite. Way to go guys. I swear, some of these conservative dickheads seem to get such a thrill out of acting in a way to purposefully offend people they deride as liberals that I get the impression that they might even cut off their own penises if they thought it would offend a liberal. Well, I for one would be very offended if they did that, so I guess they had better start looking for some clean, sharp blades.

What I Have Been Reading

Yeah, I know, I have been an absentee blogger lately. I just can't seem to find the time to sit down and crank out substantive posts, nor did I want to do lazy posts where you just link to some article and write "Check out this craziness."

Anyway, one of the things I have been doing lately is reading lots of books. One I just finished is Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne. Coyne, a professor at the University of Chicago, has given us a useful primer on evolution and the evidence that supports it to the extent that Coyne feels confident enough to label evolution "true."

Of course, this book will not persuade die-hard Biblical Literalists or Harun Yahya types. In fact, in the opening of Chapter 9, Coyne describes how after he gave a presentation a few years ago to a group of businessmen in Chicago, one of the members of the audience went up to him and said, "I found your evidence for evolution very convincing-but I still don't believe it." This book is not for people like that. Instead, Why Evolution Is True serves as a useful primer for lay persons such as myself who are interested in science but do not have an educational background in biology and evolutionary theory.

So Much For Turkey Power

Several weeks ago, I read The Long Emergency by James Kunstler. Kunstler is a critic of suburbia and in addition to his books, he has a blog with the rather blunt title Clusterfuck Nation.

The gist of Kunstler's argument in The Long Emergency is that the American suburban lifestyle will soon become unsustainable because it depends on a finite supply of cheap oil to sustain it. "The key to understanding what is about to happen to us," he writes on page 24, "is contained in the concept of global oil production peak. This is the point at which we have extracted half of all the oil that has ever existed in the world-the half that was easiest to get, the half that was most economically obtained, the half that was the highest quality and cheapest to refine."

With that, what Kunstler derides as our "happy motoring" way of life and the days of the "3,000 mile caesar salad" will soon be coming to an end. But what about alternatives to fossile fuels like wind power, solar power or biofuels? Nonsense, retorts Kunstler. "Based on everything we know right now, no combination of so-called alternative fuels or energy procedures will allow us to maintain daily life in the United States the way we have been accustomed to running it under the regime of oil." Why? "To some degree, all of the non-fossil fuel energy sources actually depend on an underlying fossil fuel economy. You can't manufacture metal wind turbines using wind energy technology. You can't make lead-acid storage batteries for solar electric systems using any known solar energy system."

But in the chapter that Kunstler devotes to deconstructing fossil fuel alternatives, the part that I found the most amusing was where he writes about a company called Changing World Technologies, which claimed that it could make oil from turkey guts via a process called thermal depolymerization. "The company's first commercially scaled plant, a $20 million installation in Carthage, Missouri, was built next to a ConAgra Foods Butterball Turkey processing factory. Company spokespersons claimed that they would ultimately make oil by this method for $10 a barrel in 2003 dollars." This made me think of the end of the first Back to the Future movie, wherein Doc Brown powers his flying Delorean with the McFly family's household trash. Kunstler goes on to to dismiss it with "Anything that sounds too good to be true usually is."

And, as recent events demonstrated, it was too good to be true. Last week I read this article, which reported that Changing World Technologies was filing for bankruptcy. From the article:

Renewable diesel fuel from the Carthage plant cost more than $11.18 a gallon to make, yet Changing World was only able to sell it for an average $1.19 last year, the filings reported. Since it began operations in 1999, the company posted accumulated losses of $117.9 million, including $60 million in the last three years.

The Carthage plant also was the subject of odor complaints from residents and state officials, who hit it with a cease-and-desist order and fines and required odor-reducing retrofits. The plant suffered from regular shutdowns - it was 80 percent operational at best, the company said. When it wasn't operating, Changing World had to pay to "divert or dispose of [turkey parts] that we received but were unable to store or process."

The claim that the plant would also be able to self-produce all the fuel needed to heat the diesel-making animal parts turned out to be optimistic. Last year alone, the company spent $900,000 to buy natural gas, nearly 7 percent of its total cost of goods sold.

In a 2004 Newsday interview, Appel predicted the company would have 10 big plants across the United States by 2009.

So, it looks like leftover turkey parts are not going to help us reduce our dependence on imported oil.

Back to Kunstler, I can't say if the dire picture he paints for us is going to come to pass or not. Generally being optimistic by nature, I like to think that we will find a way to muddle through. And yet, at the same time, if I as an atheist am skeptical about faith claims when it comes to religion, shouldn't I also be skeptical about having faith that some technological solution will be found that will provide us and our children with cheap and abundant clean energy in the coming decades? The answer of course is yes, I should be skeptical, though I would not assume the worst either. At the very least, I can do my part to try and reduce my use of fossil fuels and educate myself on energy issues so that I can be an informed advocate.

Premature Friday Funnies: The Appropriate Response to Anti-Semitism

One of my favorite movies from the early 1980's was Bad Boys, starring a young Sean Penn in a stark departure from his previous role as the stoner surfer dude Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times At Ridgement High.

Bad Boys is largely set within the confines of a facility for hardcore juvenile delinquents. As good as Penn's performance was in the movie, the most memorable character in the movie is the intelligent but twisted Jewish misfit named Horowitz, who shares a cell with Penn's character.

Below is a funny scene from the movie wherein Horowitz retaliates when the alpha male bully of the inmates, the towering Viking Lofgren (played by Clancy Brown) taunts him with anti-semitic language. As crazy as Horowitz is, you just gotta love his ballsy, take no-shit response to someone who physically outmatches him.

Isn't It Strange?

Inspired by the recent chain e-mail I received the other day, which I discussed in this post, I have decided to write my own version of "Isn't It Strange?" Here it goes:

It's strange, isn't it, that atheists and non-religious people can behave just as morally as religious people, but only in the context of religion does it seem normal when:

People walk around in public once a year with ashes smeared on their foreheads:

When men walk about in public dressed like this:

When women walk around in public dressed like this:

When people do their dishes using scouring pads like this*:

Isn't it strange?

*Not only are there color coded scrub pads so that observant Jews don't accidentally use the same scrub pad to clean a dish that contained a meat product and a dish that contained a dairy product, I also noticed that my local Shoprite sells color coded oven mitts too! Take away the religious justification for this, and we're talking about obsessive-compulsive behavior. So, what do you call it when people behave like this to appease a god that does not even exist?

Annoying Filipino Catholic Chain E-mails - Part 2

This particular one isn't as bad as the one below, but is more annoying in a way because it contains mostly commonsensical advice that does not require the God stuff mixed into it. Here goes:

This is the most beautiful advice I have ever received in an email ... Please don't close or delete this one before reading!

Fine, if you say so.

An Angel says, 'Never borrow from the future. If you worry about what may happen tomorrow and it doesn't happen, you have worried in vain. Even if it does happen, you have to worry twice.'

An angel said that? Really? Which one? When?

1. Pray Why?
2. Go to bed on time. If I stop to pray, I might not get to bed on time.
3. Get up on time so you can start the day unrushed. Sorry, I gotta press the snooze button two or three times.
4. Say No to projects that won't fit into your time schedule, or that will compromise your mental health. No disagreement there. Though in the real world we don't always have that luxury. If you stop going to church, you might have some more free time.

5. Delegate tasks to capable others. Sure. Go to church and say my prayers for me so I don't have to.
6. Simplify and unclutter your life. I work full time, have two young kids, have a house to run, and my mother to take care of. I can't simplify and unclutter my life.
7. Less is more. (Although one is often not enough, two are often too many.) Give me half of your money. That way you will have twice as much as before.
8. Allow extra time to do things and to get to places. Pure genius!

9. Pace yourself. Spread out big changes and difficult projects over time; don't lump the hard things all together. No disagreement here.
10. Take one day at a time. Ditto.
11. Separate worries from concerns . If a situation is a concern, find out what God would have you do and let go of the anxiety . If you can't do anything about a situation, forget it. There is no God to tell me what to do.
12. Live within your budget; don't use credit cards for ordinary purchases. More simple commonsense. No need to bring God into the equation.
13. Have backups; an extra car key in your wallet, an extra house key buried in the garden, extra stamps, etc. Ditto.
14. K.M.S. (Keep Mouth Shut). This single piece of advice can prevent an enormous amount of trouble. I guess that means I really can't tell you what I really think of these e-mails.
15. Do something for the Kid in You everyday. You're a dork! There, I did it.

16. Carry a Bible with you to read while waiting in line. Why the Bible when there are so many more interesting and informative books out there?
17. Get enough rest. As soon as I finish this blog post.
18. Eat right. Maybe the Bible would be useful if it contained some really good recipes.
19 Get organized so everything has its place. Come on, get real. Who has time for that?

20. Listen to a tape while driving that can help improve your quality of life. I can't. I need to pay attention to the road so I don't get into an accident and totally fuck up my quality of life.
21. Write down thoughts and inspirations. That's what this blog is for.
22. Every day, find time to be alone. My wife is at work and my kids are in bed. I'm alone now.
23. Having problems? Talk to God on the spot. Try to nip small problems in the bud. Don't wait until it's time to go to bed to try and pray. All you really needed to do was write "Try to nip small problems in the bud." The rest was totally unnecessary.
24. Make friends with Godly people. I guess that means you don't want to be friends with me.

25. Keep a folder of favorite scriptures on hand. Why?
26. Remember that the shortest bridge between despair and hope is often a good 'Thank you Jesus .' What has Jesus done for me lately?
27. Laugh. You make me laugh.
28. Laugh some more! Let's not get carried away now.
29. Take your work seriously, but not yourself at all. I prefer the reverse, actually.
30. Develop a forgiving attitude (most people are doing the best they can). I forgive you for writing these stupid e-mails I keep getting.
31. Be kind to unkind people (they probably need it the most). Perhaps. But some people are really just assholes.
32. Sit on your ego. If you say so.
33 Talk less; listen more. Okay.
34. Slow down. I wasn't going fast to begin with.
35. Remind yourself that you are not the general manager of the universe. Why? It never occurs to me to think that I am.
36 Every night before bed, think of one thing you're grateful for that you've never been grateful for before. GOD HAS A WAYOF TURNING THINGS AROUND FOR YOU. I'm grateful that the God of the Bible doesn't exist.

'If God is for us, who can be against us?' (Romans8:31) That's why the Philippines is such an economic success story, right? The only reason you're Catholic is because the Spanish got to your ancestors before the Muslims did. If the Spanish got there 100 years later, you would probably sending Muslim chain e-mails right now.

My instructions were to send this to four people that I wanted God to bless and I picked you. I decided to send it to more than four, because I didn't want to limit blessings. So God, if He exists, isn't going to bless me unless you send me an e-mail?

SEND IT FORWARD PLEASE, Not backward! You do realize this is the 21st century, right? It's really long overdue that you put this silly, superstitious bullshit behind you.

Annoying Filipino Catholic Chain E-mails - Part 1

One of my wife's friends from nursing school days back in the Philippines has our e-mail address and has recently taken to forwarding chain e-mails to us. Since my wife never really uses e-mail, I am the one who ends up reading these damned things. Being the atheist that I am, I really have to suppress the urge to fire off a response to these silly things. After all, I wouldn't want to alienate my wife's friends, though it is quite a double standard that they can bombard us with Christian e-mail chains, but if I provide an atheist critique then I am upsetting the apple cart.

So, in order to give vent to my frustrations, I will reproduce and respond to them here.

Okay, here is the first one, followed by my responses in red:

IT IS STRANGE ISN'T IT...
how a 20 dollar bill seems like such a large amount when you donate it to church, but such a small amount when you go shopping?

Uh, no, not really. Because when you spend money in a store, you are actually buying stuff that you need like food or gasoline. When you drop $20 in a collection box in church, you are not acquiring anything of value. And, when the price of gasoline was over $4.00 per gallon last summer, twenty bucks barely amounted to half a tank of gas.

Isn't it strange how 2 hours seem so long when you're at church, and how short they seem when you're watching a good movie?

No, because church (at least mass at a Catholic church) is immensely boring whereas a good movie engages your senses.

Isn't it strange that you can't find a word to say when you're praying but.. you have no trouble thinking what to talk about with a friend?

What is this statement based on? Why does this person believe that one can't find a word to say when praying? When I was a Catholic, I knew exactly what I wanted to say when I prayed. As for talking with a friend, when you know someone well, you have common frames of reference and shared experiences. What a stupid question!

Isn't it strange how difficult and boring it is to read one chapter of the Bible but how easy it is to read 100 pages of a popular novel or ZANE GREY book?

Well, maybe because the Bible is a boring book to read. What possible relevance does the Book of Nahum have to my life?

Isn't it strange how everyone wants front-row-tickets to concerts or games but they do whatever is possible to sit at the last row in Church?

Is this asshole seriously suggesting that nobody sits in the front row in Church? Comparing a sports stadium or a concert arena to a Catholic church is disingenuous. The former are much larger, and the further away you are the less involved you are in the action. Besides, it is physically impossible for everyone to sit in the back of Church.

Isn't it strangehow we need to know about an event for Church 2-3 weeks before the day so we can include it in our agenda, but we can adjust it for other events in the last minute?

"Honey, my car broke down on the freeway. Can you come and pick me up?" "Sorry, I can't. I have a church picnic to attend in 15 minutes." Fucking stupid!

Isn't it strangehow difficult it is to learn a fact about God to share it with others; but how easy it is to learn, understand, extend and repeat gossip?

What facts about God are there? Beliefs about God are not facts. The most one can say about God, if such an entity exists, is that it is too vast for the human mind to comprehend. Apart from that, what else can one say?

Isn't it strange how we believe everything that magazines and newspapers say but... we question the words in the Bible?

Who believes everything they read in the magazines and newspapers? I don't. And is this person seriously suggesting we shouldn't question the Bible?

Isn't it strange how everyone wants a place in heaven but... they don't want to believe, do, or say anything to get there?

Sure, everyone likes the idea of a place where there is no suffering. But if such a place really exists, how do I know that you know what I need to believe, do, or say to get there?

Isn't it strange how we send jokes in e-mails and they are forwarded right away but when we are going to send messages about God, we think about it twice before we share it with others?

More like "Isn't it strange how I can have e-mail messages sent to me about God, but I have to think twice about replying with an atheist critique because it will offend everyone?"

IT'S STRANGE ISN'T IT?

No, the person who wrote these questions is strange.

Now that you've read this message, will you forward it to anybody that you consider a friend, family member or foe (enemy).

No, I will not.

If you choose not to share His message you may deprive yourself from being blessed as well as depriving others.... who may need God in their life.

Right. This God is supposed to be so powerful and intelligent and perfect, and yet His message is supposed to be conveyed to me by some idiot who asks stupid questions. I for one am not impressed.