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There is no morality to be found in religions and their scriptures. It is a human being who interprets the words and it is human being that makes the decision to x or y – no religious magic involved. So what is happening in Palmyra with ISIS is a testament to how religion enables truly shitty human behaviour.
“ISIS militants have blown up two ancient tombs they consider sacrilegious in Palmyra, a 2,000-year-old UNESCO World Heritage site in central Syria, the ultra hardline Sunni Muslim group said on Tuesday.
The report was the first of any damage being done by the militants to buildings in Palmyra since they seized control of the city, also known as Tadmur, in May. Syrian forces have bombed the city, and the militants camped within it, since then.”
Destroying world history because someone interpreted the tombs to be sacrilegious. This is some zany shit we are dealing with here – the lesson here is quite clear, and quite obvious: When the religious are in charge all bets are off and nothing is safe, not even history from the perverse ideals of radical religious thought.
Boiling down all the hoo-haa we can see that, at least in the case of ISIS, the religious piece is there for the sole reason of keeping people in line and most definitely not thinking for themselves. What reason can be supplied for destroying tombs that isn’t irrational?
Of course, destroying archaeological, is small potatoes in comparison with the recent acts of violence in France and Tunisia. How much more evidence is required before the West will decisively act and put an end to ISIS and their extremism?
I should have known! Sometimes I just bite off more than I can chew. It’s that damned hope…but I’m getting ahead of myself.
For those of you still unaware, John Zande has just put out a new book. Further, in an unimaginable act of generosity, he has been gracious enough to share some of the basic groundwork concerning his case for an omnimalevolent creator in a few recent posts over at The Superstitious Naked Ape. Briefly, all the suffering in the universe points to a creator that is all knowing, all powerful, and all malevolent. It is a surprisingly polished theology, surpassing all others before it in terms coherency and elegance.
Reading through these delicious teaser-trailer posts, an idea arose that I may have uncovered a fatal flaw in Zande’s otherwise brilliant reasoning. It came to me while I was reading through his latest post, “Before there was Light: A Functional Proof for the Omnimalevolent Creator“. Even before I finished reading the post, I had named this flaw ‘The Problem of Good’. I even had clear cut example to demonstrate it: Me. Read the rest of this entry »
Almost all of us have had one. You race away from what you happen to be doing we the grand expectation of someone you know coming to pay you a visit for a coffee or whatever. But no, it isn’t like that at all. It is a stranger and their goal is to test your politeness and patience while they ramble on about trying to save your soul and getting to know Jebus and all that hullabaloo.
Another unhappy feature of this is that these proselytizers are usually so damned nice about the whole thing. So despite the fact you happen to be imagining opening one of your own veins and spraying them with your blood while commanding your high-lord Beelzebub to rain hell fire down them, instead one tends to smile back and politely nod and just wish that they would go away.
I find the door knocking proselytizers to be such a troublesome situation to deal with appropriately. Of course inappropriate responses cost more socially speaking, but seem to be a touch more satisfying.
I’ve always gone the polite route, but does anyone else have some slam dunk suggestions for dealing with situations like these? I’d like to increase the size of my bag of tricks, so to speak.
Religion and patriarchal bullshite usually go hand in hand. The Quiverfull movement proudly leads this toxic parade of misogyny, combining the worst of religion and misogyny all into one neat corrosive package.
Witness how much grievous stupidity can be gleaned from just one biblical verse:
“Children are a blessing and gift from the Lord.
Having a lot of children to take care of you in your old age is like a warrior with a lot of arrows.
Psalm 127:3-4″
Let the fun begin…
It appears TLC is quite aware on which side its toast is buttered. Look what they were airing a couple weeks before the Duggar scandal broke:
Feminists beware: the new TLC special “Submissive Wives’ Guide To Marriage” is sure to stir a hot debate by showing marriages in which the woman caters to her husband’s every need and allows him to be the king of the castle.
And that means he gets plenty of sex, too—even when she’s not in the mood.
sigh… anybody remember when it was The Learning Channel, and showed actual educational programming?
I was going to preface this post with a Captain Stupid character but I found that the outright level of stupid going on here required a (much) higher rank in the Hurr-Durr Legion to properly accommodate the conditions being described. The leaders of the ulta-orthodox Belz sect in North London eminently qualify for Admiralty in the Legion. These antediluvian bags of douche recently deployed a fatwah against women who have the audacity to drive cars with the “immodest” goal of… it is almost nigh unspeakable… yet intone it I must… (*screwing courage to the sticking place*) – taking their children to school!!!! (!).
“The Belz, who originated in Ukraine in the early 19th Century, are an ultra-Orthodox sect who follow Haredi Judaism.
Leaders of the ultra-Orthodox Belz sect in north London wrote to parents saying “no child will be allowed to learn in our school” if their mother drives.
Women driving “goes against the laws of modesty within our society”, it said.”
Furthermore:
“The letter, which was signed from the “spiritual management” of Belz institutions, said: “There has been an increase in incidences of mothers of our students who have begun driving cars, something that goes against the laws of modesty within our society.”
Well, well, well. Here we have, once again, patriarchal religious bullshit fucking up women’s lives. Ostensibly in the pursuit of modesty women, already tasked with r
aising their children and domestic duties because it is their god mandated role, can’t do the car thing because that might give them airs about independence or freedom; certainly anything that detracts from their roles as broodmares and domestic servants must be against God.
I knew this was going to be a pithy article when I saw the Ultra-Orthodox in the title because as soon as the religious attach the word ‘Orthodox’ to their particular school of magic – you know horrendous things are on the way. On the downside, treating women as chattel is only Level One in their quest to construct a broken religious society.
These regressive dolts embrace ignorance with the mightiest of aplomb.
“An emphasis on studying the Torah has led to concerns that Haredi boys are leaving school with few qualifications.
Men often continue with their prayer studies after marriage, rather than seek work, and those who do have employment have been affected by changes in traditional occupations, like textiles.
As a result, poverty and deprivation tend to hit Haredi households hard, and there’s evidence that Haredi areas in Hackney, for example, receive higher than average rates of means-tested benefits.”
So the focus of their education for dudes is to think-fap on their magic book until they are useless to themselves and the rest of society. Care to guess who has to work in the real world and make real money aaaaand still be the domestic servant? And of course, living in a secular society means that the rest of the population has to pay for their religious bridge-to-nowhere-educmacational-bollocks-regime. Never, not even for one minute, should you consider religion to be a positive force in society, these yahoos exemplify the bulk-stupid that most religions bring to the societal table.
“[…] from the Belz community, a spokesman said it never intended to “stigmatise or discriminate against children or their parents”.
It said: “We are proud of what we stand for and we do not feel the need to excuse ourselves for our deeply held beliefs and staunchly maintained way of life.
“It has withstood the test of time and is not prone to the vagaries of passing fads.”
Counterexample time!
It was not our intent to stigmatize colour children by giving them their own drinking fountain and forbidding them to use the one labelled ‘Whites Only’ – because intent, like their religiously-addled ‘declarations’, are fucking magical.
I cast a cynical eye toward a belief system that is evaluated and venerated on the single condition of being ‘long-lived’. The Bubonic plague has withstood the test of time as well – checkmarks of goodness to be dispensed for all…
The extra-sad take away from this is that these religious misogynists, by enforcing the ban on women driving their kids to school, has created a what is essentially a nightmare scenario for British legislators.
“This goes to the heart of what is a fantastically difficult problem now facing the government in drafting a counter-extremism bill that protects against extremism, but also safeguards religious freedom.
Earlier this year, Home Secretary Theresa May defined extremism as “the vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”.
It throws up the question, is a religious ban on women driving active opposition to the British value of individual liberty? And how do you square that with the other British value of mutual respect and tolerance for different faiths and beliefs?”
The above is worth an entire post unto itself just to document the outrageous pretzel-bends secular lawmakers are undertaking in attempting to deal with this religious foolishness. Invoking the religious tolerance idea for misogynistic practices that are clearly antithetical to a secular society seems misguided to me. But that, as stated, is another debate.
Let’s close instead with a statement from the high-admiral shitlords themselves:
“The statement continued: “In an effort to formulate these guidelines the issue of women driving cars became conflated with broader issues which we intended to address. “
They know.
You don’t release baffle-gab press releases like the above without not knowing.
How could they not know that the stupid shit they are imposing on women and children stinks all the way up to their imaginary heaven. Once their nuclear-grade stupid hit the Press and the rest of secular society, it was rightly called out for being pure Dumbonium, their only recourse is to hide behind the thin mantle of ‘religious tolerance’ and hope the attention of the public wanes from their self-created sewer of misguided religious tomfoolery.
And there we have it folks – religion once again attempting to lead society away from civilization and modernity.
Many thanks to Intransigentia for bringing this lovely story to my attention.
I am going to start this post with a big fat trigger warning: incest, sexual abuse of children, adults in positions of power revictimizing survivors of sexual abuse, victim-blaming, gaslighting. This is a post about some seriously sick and fucked up shit.
The story about the oldest son in the Duggar family of (former) hit TV show 19 Kids and Counting, having molested several of his very young sisters, as well as at least one non-relative, is old news by now. (Story here if you aren’t familiar with it. Trigger warnings abound.)
There are any number of angles I could take on this story: how the adults who should have been protecting those little girls, instead circled the wagons to protect the family’s reputation; the social, religious, and political connections that may have been leveraged to keep this quiet as long as it was; the possibility that the TV station was aware (at least of rumours) of some of this and just kept the show going for years; Josh’s gross fauxpology; the rampant prevalence of sexual abuse of girls and women in Dominionist and Quiverfull sects; the way Christians are acting like the Duggars are being persecuted; the claim Christians make that an alleged human sacrifice 2000 years ago makes everything OK now; the Christian emphasis on forgiveness and turning the other cheek, that is so easily and often used to silence victims and empower abusers.
I want to talk about those little girls. Michelle Duggar (their mom) says they received counselling. She didn’t give specifics, but considering that actual licensed therapists are mandatory reporters, and mandatory reports were not made, we can assume the counselling was of a less-formal variety. It so happens that the organization that is the source of many of the Duggars’ beliefs, and produces much of their home-school curriculum, the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), has a lesson plan for counselling survivors of sexual abuse. It is horrifying. Nearly every point victim-blames and/or displays callous disregard for the survivor’s pain. Image of the document after the break.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
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