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Christian Reality…
It is like watching a traffic accident, everyone just slows down and gawks at the spectacle at hand. The wordpress reader made me slow down and read this post from Cynthia on The Trumpet Sound.
Now usually when I see the godbaggy speak oozing forth from a blog I just keep on going knowing that safely nothing of any intelligible substance will come from there. Today folks though, it is different. This post pretty much has it all – Dreams! Prophecy! Revelation! – oh and the usual racism and batshit insane calumny one expects from the non-reality based.
This is a perfect example of Jon Stewart’s Mudslide on BullShit Mountain. If all your friends and media are saying the same things (based on magic happy thoughts) one has no way of telling what is actually happening outside of your little bubble of delusion. Our devoted GOP base are out of touch reality and as this upcoming examination of their brand of thinking will show, the way to fix problems caused by your delusional beliefs is with… moar delusional beliefs.
Hang on to your hats kids, the Arbourist and the trusty Ole SnarkyRed Pen O’ Justice will be scribing with the full righteous fury of rationality for your benefit today.
Let’s get this party started. (tomfoolery in brown, justice in red)
In the day following my posting of the article “America is Sinking,” I got physically super exhausted that I slept through the day while the election was being concluded in the US. While in deep sleep I got a phone call from my Mom-in-law informing me that Obama won. (I’m pretty sure one cannot be in a deep sleep and talk with the in-laws at the same time, although this could be a extraordinary ability powered by jebus himself, we should err on the side of caution and conclude this is merely poor writing.) We talked for a while and as she hang up, still with my eyes closed I asked, “Now what, Lord?”(Because eye open prayers and pleas to your magic sky daddy is for the sinners dontcha know.)
Then I heard the still small voice in my spirit, “It’s time to mourn.” (Oh, you actually questioned the voices in your head, good for you!) Then I said, “If I heard you correctly, Lord, please give me your word on it.” (You talked back to the voices in your head, bad for you. Not to mention questioning the supreme ooga-booga? I think you get to burn in hell for that one, just sayn’)
Then I could hear the voice said, “Open your Bible,” so I did. (Who doesn’t listen to the voices in their head – oh right..sane people) With eyes half opened, I saw the big bold letters: LAMENTATIONS and the highlighted first two verses. I needed go no further for I have known the verses to heart (full points for rote memorization of a dusty tomb of ancient bronze age wisdom) as these were the same words that He gave me when I asked for confirmation if I saw and heard right about the prophetic connection between A.A. Allen’s Vision and Don McLean’s American Pie song which I wrote here: (yes, folks there is divinity in the song American Pie, if you can see through the tears of laughter follow the link and let gods ‘wisdom’ revealed).
How lonely lies the city that once thronged with people! Once great among the nations, now she is like a widow! Once princess among provinces, she has become a vassal.
Bitterly she weeps at night, tears running down her cheeks. Not one of all her lovers is there to comfort her. Her friends have all betrayed her; they have become her enemies.
As I pondered on the situation and the word of the Lord, I remembered the Statue of Liberty prominently on a very dark background.(Phreaky!!)I thought that’s what America now, covered in darkness as Obama remains in the White House. When the thought of the White House hit , I saw a glimpse of a “black” White House. I thought it was weird, a “black” White House! (well duh! Black is evil and we all know what colour Obama is….Eeeeeevill!) When I recalled the image, it actually looked like a haunted house.
The Lord confirmed this impression of darkness covering America when yesterday I woke up and saw Obama and heard, “Darkness has swallowed up the land.”
(Well I’m glad for the sake of veracity that you are double checking your facts.)
This morning I woke up to a dream (distinguishing between sleep and awake cycles seems problematic for you). In the dream I was in our house in America. Then there came a storm, raging in its fury. It was horrifying as I watched it destroyed everything along the way. The land was covered with water that it became like a sea and our house standing in the middle of the sea. The tsunami-like waves rolled several times over. Then came the strongest wind which uprooted several trees and gave a devastating blow all over. The last wave hit and receded and hardened. Everything was destroyed except our house which remained intact and unscratched. Then there was stillness as if the world stood still. (You are making this shit up to conform to your feelings and then adding “my skydaddy says so” to make your confused rantings sound important.).
The stillness though was very brief for there came a very loud noise of merrymaking. My Mom and I went to the window to see what was happening. We saw people in gay costumes on the watered street . The noise was the sound of a band marching on the street still covered with water. These people are homosexuals (because people in frivolous uniforms = homosexuals the world over, a pox on you shiny sequins!!). My mother asked what they were doing. Then I told her, “This is what the Lord said, that these people do not believe that the storm is His judgment. They still do not believe that God is judging them for their perversion.(And you were worried that Cynthia would only be a racist, but like so many delusional christian warriors the homophobia runs strong as well.) Their merrymaking is an act of defiance, telling God to His face, ‘We don’t believe you.’” (How dare they not believe in my mythology!?! That is a double burning in hell forever on you – and take your sequins with you!!) Just as I said that the sky darkened again and another storm was coming quickly. Then I woke up (You do know that its okay to express your opinions without all the weirdness right?).
Obama was re-elected because America never woke up to reality during his first term(Oh cupcake, the reality you talk about has been around you since day 1, inside the insipid religious bubble of stupid you inhabit reality doesn’t make a whit of sense). The close contest (actually Obama always ahead, but then again, in fantasy land that factual based shite doesn’t matter.) between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney was an indication that the Lord could have changed His mind and given the US another grace period (by grace period you mean more government policy based on the shitty things you believe that have little to do with reality or rational thought.) with a lesser evil in the White House. But as Americans never learned and humbled themselves before God (prostrating oneself for mythological creatures has gone out of style, at least for those who value rationality), He has now given the nation over to the power of the devil (No, not the Devil!) . Evil will be unleashed in greater intensity. Obama is the embodiment of Satan (oh yes, the Devil).
( Just a brief note. Thinking like this is partially responsible for the Democratic victory in 2012, so really my GOP base friends pray harder, its working wonders for you.)
All is lost….
Sometimes people manage to crystallize a thought or a notion into a wonderful passage that is explicit, yet concise all at the same time. The Cynical Romantic from an older discussion thread on Pharyngula manages to capture much about what Atheism plus is and why it has been formed.
[fixed formatting from the original post]
I totally dislike the idea of leaving the battleground on the sexism topic to the minority of offenders.
If there were a minority of offenders, that would indeed be a bad strategy.
Unfortunately, we have multiple stripes of “offenders.” The hardcore misogynist rape-threat-spewing hate-driven trolls are a minority. And if the rest of the community were against them, we might be able to drive them out.
However, regular old run-of-the-mill “I don’t hate women; that would require paying attention to them, and I’d rather spend my time talking about how smart I am” moderate sexists who don’t really give a shit about doing anything about the trolls… we appear to have a metric fuckton of those. They are really, really not a minority in the movement. They are likely the New Atheist base. And that sort of bullshit enables the really serious MRAs and trolls. Finding out that those people don’t care about us and don’t have our back in the face of mistreatment is disheartening. The oblivious, genteelly sexist types go all the way up to the “leaders” of the movement, to the degree that we have leaders (see: Dawkins mocking Rebecca Watson for pointing out that atheist men can do stupid shit too).
We cannot kick the hateful trolls out of the movement because not enough people in the movement give a shit. And we cannot kick the regular sexists out of the movement because they make up too much of the movement.
Hence the attempt to explicitly create a separate space within the movement where we all will have each other’s backs.
Not too many surprises here folks, subscribing to the radical notion that women are people too is how we roll around here.
By now most people (the US being the notable exception) get that religion is a toxic entity that has no place in the 21st century. The insipid nature of religion is usually highlighted in the DWR Sunday Disservice, however today will be different. Today we get to share one persons story of how they transitioned out of belief in the grand ooga-booga to more rational atheistic world view. So, no blood pressure raising religious idiocy today, just kick back and relax.
Or anyone who claims to be rational. I’m not sure how the religious do the whole indoctrination thing with a straight face. Can you imagine?
Child: How were we made?
Parent: Well you see this magic ooga-booga decided to scrape some mud together and breath life into it about 6,000 years ago….
Child: But I learned in school today that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago…
Parent: Stop talking sense, or you’ll go to hell!
Child: (cowering)(is quiet)
Err…yes, anyhow lets not do that kids, they deserve better. Much better than what the vapid crusty old religious have to offer.
“Do you believe in god?”
“No.”
“Well, do you believe in love?”
“Sure.”
“Then you must believe in god, as god is love”
“Wha…?”
I’ve heard the ‘god is love’ bit quite a number of times, but never as a proof for its deistic existence. When it is merely an assertion about a god already presumed to exist, it is easy enough to show that ‘god is love’ is an absolutely ludicrous notion. One merely needs to point to deeds/positions attributed to the god in question that cannot be seen as loving. In the case of christianity, the bible helps us out immensely with tales of murder, rape, slavery, genocide, and human sacrifice, all in the name of their god, to make this a very easy task. In addition, one could also point to the innumerable atrocities committed by those closest to god. Indeed, the degree of horror believers can enact seems directly related to the level of zeal they possess. Or, if one took ‘god is love’ to be a part of omni-benevolence, then one could point to the problem of evil to show how god cannot exist. But in this conversation, all this doesn’t work yet.
It doesn’t work because a particular god has not been identified. The only characteristic mentioned is that ‘god is love’. To be sure, the person who presented this argument to me had a specific god in mind. If they were to have gone so far as to start describing other attributes of their god, then the thoughts in the previous paragraph would surely destroy their position. But that’s not the point. While the posited syllogism is vague, maybe even a bit flaky, if it works, then the belief in god is validated and the little details about the surrounding nature of god (everything he is that isn’t solely love) can be hashed out later. The important thing is that god has been proven and all us atheists are just being fussy about superfluous factoids.
The thing is, the details may be superfluous, but that these details exist at all is not. If one wants to say that ‘god’ is exactly synonymous with ‘love’, then the concept of ‘god’ is completely useless. There is no reason for there to be two words when one will do. And as ‘love’ is a much more flexible term (how weird would it be -even for theists – to replace the word love and say something like “I’m deeply in god with you, darling”), the term ‘god’ ought to be discarded. Of course, the theist resists this, not only because they don’t want to give up their delusion, but also because, at some level, they are aware of the little dishonesty in the assertion ‘god is love’.
It is dishonesty in omission. No theist ever would ever say ‘god is love and only love’. If they did, as I showed last paragraph, ‘god’ would be rendered meaningless. What they are not saying is “god is love and some other things I’m trying to illegitimately sneak into this argument so I don’t have to go through the impossible task of justifying those extra attributes.” Even if the only thing they wanted to add was ‘god is love and a sentient entity that exists outside of humanity’, they would be right back where they started, with no evidence, no proof, and no reason to think that god exists. Nothing addresses always-unmentioned second half. But theists are never that honest, least of all to themselves.
But hey, I was wrong that one time before. It could happen again. What if some theist comes up with some brilliant argument that refutes what I just said, so brilliant that I cannot answer those refutations? Does ‘god is love’ work then? Not hardly. Consider an exercise in consistency.
Do you believe that the sea exits? You do? Great! That means you must believe in Poseidon, for Poseidon IS the sea. The tides reflect his breathing, the waves his mood. Thus, we can learn a lot about Poseidon just by looking at the sea. As any seafarer will tell you, conditions out on the briny sea can are uncertain at best, displaying how temperamental Poseidon is. Therefore it is always good to offer a sacrifice to Poseidon before any travel by sea, in order to secure safe passage.
Are you convinced? Will you now pray to Poseidon? Not a chance. Why? Because you just can’t attach a real life thing to an imagined being and have it pop into existence, that’s why. If this method worked, you would have to believe in Apollo because you believe in the sun, Thor because you believe in lightning, Gazunga because you believe in cheese, and Eros because you believe in love. Wait! What was that? Love was for that christian god, wasn’t it? Yup, this line of reasoning can bring into existence multiple deities for the same real life phenomenon.
In fact, it can pop into being an infinite amount of gods, an infinite amount of whom require that they be the only god. That either means that this line of reasoning is necessarily incoherent, or it shows that each god concept has an equal chance of being true, which, in this case, is literally infinitesimally small.
‘God is love’, like all such fanciful tripe (eg. ‘God is beauty’, ‘God is truth’, ‘God is justice’, etc) either renders god meaningless and the idea ought to be discarded, or it is dishonest and the idea ought to be discarded. Even on the minuscule chance that I’m wrong on this, the same method could then be used to validate an infinite number of mutually-exclusive gods and the idea ought to be discarded. No matter what, theists using this line are not being deep, spiritual, other-worldly, or mystical. They are just being wrong.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…