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Welcome to the 21st century. A time where demonic possessions, cursed spirits, and other such notions of the supernatural manifestations have been gratefully laughed into the tabloids where no sane person, and certainly no judiciary body, would give them anything other than scorn and ridicule. Oh wait….it seems some courts haven’t learned much since the Dark Ages. Fuck… Today’s disservice comes from an article from yesterday’s Journal.
Two decades ago, in a Jewish court in Jerusalem, a secular lawyer was sentenced for insulting the court. I’m not sure, but I think the penalty for contempt of court around these parts is a fine, maybe a short jail term. I welcome any clarification on this point, as law is no speciality of mine. Whatever it is, it’s nothing like what the courts hand out in the “holy land”. The offending lawyer was cursed by the courts, that his soul would be reincarnated into the body of an impure dog.
That’s right. They cursed him.
If that was all there was to this story, we could just laugh at the silly religious nutbags who think they can curse/condemn/bless people because of their elite status with whatever deity, but alas no. As it has happened countless times before, the ludicrous notions of believers resulted in events much too horrible to be laughed off. Fast forward two decades and the court is interrupted by a dog who will not leave.
Well, says one of the judges, this must be that lawyer we cursed all those years ago. Seems he still hasn’t learned his lesson. Therefore, the good, just, and sane thing to do is sentence this dog to death. But a quick death is too good for him, thus we order the method of execution to be stoning! Praise be to our invisible sky-daddy!
A court, a judicial body, societal elites who are law experts, cursed one man and sentenced a dog to die by stoning. I am rebounding between incredulity at how ludicrous this is and disgust at how appalling this is. Mistreatment of animals is a grievous evil and being stoned to death is a horrifying fate, undeserved by even histories worst criminals. But it gets worse. The court decided that the stoning was to be carried out by local children. Children! I can only imagine what the psychological ramifications of having to not only witness, but take part in such a brutal and savage atrocity would do to an impressionable youth. I can’t even imagine what it would do to me. In one fell swoop, this court orders a barbaric act of animal cruelty and an unforgivable act of child abuse. Why? Because of their faith in the supernatural, and the arrogance that people can affect said supernatural through curses and blessings.
Fortunately, this double dose of monstrous infamy was ultimately thwarted. Not by reason, of course. The religious are impervious to logic when it comes to their faith. No, the dog somehow managed to escape on its own. I would like to think that someone there, anyone, saw the horror of the intended sentence and made it so the dog could get away. I would like to think that a seed of doubt took just enough root to drive someone into action against the ‘holy court’, even if only to anonymously save a dog. A wild hope, I know, but at present, wild hopes are all I that I can muster for the religiously controlled areas of the world.
First, to any and all Christians who claim to believe the world is ending tomorrow, I don’t believe you for a second. I invite you to prove me wrong. Spend the rest of today donating every single penny and asset you have accumulated over you life to charity. Give up your house, your life savings, everything you own (maybe pack yourself a lunch) to the underprivileged. You won’t need it anyway, and the charity will look good on your resume when pining for positions in heaven. What’s the matter? Not enough faith? I thought not.
But before the second coming of christ (giggety giggety) we have another very important event: today is Draw Mohammad Day! Here is my 2011 contribution, a fine display of microsoft paint skills, if I do say so myself.
If you have no idea what this post is all about, here is a great vid from one of my youTube favs, Thunderf00t, explaining everything.
This is a delightful video. Nothing illustrates the absurdity of a bigoted position like keeping the content and switching the roles. Kudos to youtuber healthyaddict for posting this vid and especially for introducing me to Greta Christina’s Blog. I highly recommend checking the blog out for some truly thorough and well written debunking of theistic skulduggery.
Celebrate rationality, skepticism, critical thought, and the joyous wonder they can bring.
Richard Dawkins has been someone I’ve respected and looked up to for a long time. He is a champion of truth, science, and education. This, of course, has made him an enemy of religion. The small jump from role-model of the highest order to hero took the rallying up of people in an effort to bring down the king-pin of the religious world: the pope.
There are many who are involved in the ‘arrest the pope’ campaign and they all deserve our respect and support. Dawkins, with his succinct and eloquent charisma, is a perfect addition to this cause. Hope springs anew!
I often worry about attacking straw men. When positing my arguments against a position, I often wonder is this position I’m attacking really the best the other side has to offer? Surely there must be a more educated and reasonable version of this put forth by someone who’s actually an expert in the field. I am confronted with feelings of disappointment rather than vindication when it turns out the “less refined” argument I am debating against actually encapsulates everything their experts have to back them up.
This disappointment gripped me thoroughly as I read an article by columnist and best selling author, Reza Aslan. The article is posted here. In it, Aslan speaks out against “the new atheism” and its heroes, Harris, Hitchens, Denett, and Dawkins. One would hope that a distinguished writer like Aslan would be able to display the best that the religious and their apologists has to offer, especially as this is the exact topic with which Aslan has acquired his writing accolades. But where I hoped to find well thought out and more in depth reasoning, I found only the same weak arguments delivered with a slightly better vocabulary and smoother writing style than the unknowns I’d been debating with previously. But, as I do still want to avoid any chance of straw-manning, here is my reply to Reza Aslan, champion writer for the anti-secularists. Sit tight, its a doozy.
Aslan starts by talking about a bus-board that reads ‘THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE’ saying that he
laughed, amused that atheists in the UK were miming propaganda techniques perfected by evangelical groups.
My objection to this comparison is two-fold. First, he is making use of a type of ad hominem known as the ‘you too’ fallacy. Theists engage in this fallacy relentlessly as they seem quite happy to rebound any criticism of religion and use it on science. Atheists are just as stubborn in their beliefs as theists are. Science requires as much faith as religion does. Atheists use as much propaganda as evangelicals do. These ‘you too’ statements are fallacious because they depend on where the objection is coming from, not on what the objection is; even if theists were correct in saying that non-theists are guilty of the same logical flaws, it doesn’t mean that theists get a free pass to engage in those flaws.
Which leads me to my second objection, that non-theists are NOT valid objects of the ‘you too’ defense, even if it weren’t fallacious. Aslan figures that a bus ad is equivalent to evangelical propaganda? One: Bus ads are universally used by organizations of a multitude of platforms from cancer research foundations to community events to the sale of cookies. It isn’t fair to suddenly consider this medium a condemnation worthy strategy the moment a secularists to uses it.
Two: Even if bus ads are propaganda, theists employ much more dastardly methods. There are no atheist camps where children are scared/scarred with threats of eternal torture if they believe in a god. There are no weekly gatherings where atheists sing repetitive songs about the non-existence of gods and how the only reason that any good in the world exists is because of this deistic absence. There are no atheists on street corners or on tv crying that if one is a believer it is impossible for that person to act in a moral fashion and further, the believer is evil and deserves some cosmic punishment, if only such a thing existed.
If you engage in a ‘you too’ fallacy, but the subject on which you use it is not, in fact, also doing it, what you have done is admitted that what you are doing is wrong as well as shown that you are unable to accept responsibility for this wrong doing and must resort to some Fruedian projection in order to cover up your own shortcomings.
I have only covered the first two introductory paragraphs and there is more intellectual dishonesty, misrepresentation, and flat out wrongness than I would allow from even wayward trolls that happen to slime across my posts. Surely this poster boy for religious apologetics can do better than this. Surely that multitude of perverse sophistry was just a mis-step, the rest of the article will be full of good solid….ohhhh fiddlesticks… Read the rest of this entry »
It amazes me how sometimes, when I criticize something in religion, the defence that theists supply are just as bad or worse than my original criticism. For instance, I have often said that the sermon on the mount promotes the idea of thought crime. Thinking hateful things is the same as murder and thinking sexy things is the same as adultery. If anything could show Christian dogma to be one of totalitarian fascism rather than of love, its the idea that you can be guilty just by thinking something.
When I point this out, I often get told that the message that I OUGHT to be getting from that passage is that, in the eyes of god, a sin is a sin. Sins are all equal under god’s divine judgment.
The first time I heard this, I did a double take. Even someone who’s had their intelligence ebbed by the retarding forces of religion should be able to see the horrible consequences of that little gem. Alas, once again, my optimism and charity were quickly deflated. That person was serious. So were the great number of believers who have told me the same thing since.
So, for them, and any who happen to think along the same lines, I would like to explain why it is so horrible. By saying a sin is a sin is a sin, and they are all morally equivalent in the eyes of god, the theist is equating the suffering a shop owner feels when someone steals a piece of gum from his store to the suffering felt by a rape victim. Indeed, if two people each steal a piece of gum, the shop owner has suffered from twice as many sins against him than the rape victim, so the shopkeeper has, by Christian math, been wronged more.
While I could go on at length why this is horrendous in the worst kind of way, I think if you can’t figure it for yourself, you are beyond any help that my postings can ever hope to give. But, to my amazement, the believers aren’t stumped by this. They say ‘oh, of course, to us humans one is much worse than the other, but I’m talking about in GOD’S eyes, not ours’.
They don’t seem to realize that their answer still doesn’t make anything better. They say that their god is perfectly good and just. If that is so, any difference between humans perception and that of their god would mean a deficiency on our part. That means, according to this abhorrent little bit Christian philosophy, rape victims are WRONG when they feel worse than the robbed shopkeeper. And our justice system is WRONG to treat the rapist more severely than it treats the gum thief. For if they were a bit more like Jesus, they would see that a sin is a sin and the right thing to do is to treat them equally.
If it’s morally reprehensible that a human take a certain view (like candy burglary is as bad as rape) then it would be just as revolting if a sky faerie took that view. So, not only does this sermon on the mount establish the ground rules for thought crime, it also, thanks to the defence posited by Christians, shows their god to be a despicable and morally bankrupt entity that belittles the suffering those who have endured the worst of crimes.
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