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Stop behaving as if you have feelings, because religion!
Considering the amount of revenue generated on Valentine’s Day (I’m looking at you 9.99 roses that mysteriously appreciate to 29.99) it can be safely said that Valentine’s Day will never be banned in North America. However, in societies that still give the religious the time of day, Valentine’s Day is in trouble. That little bastard Cupid promotes lustful, shameful, immodest-ful behaviour and represents the totality of all the six hundred and sixty six layers of hell.
“LONDON — While much of the world celebrates Valentine’s Day on Thursday, Pakistan’s religious political parties are exhorting the country’s youth to celebrate a “day of modesty” instead.”
You can always count on the religious parties to hoist themselves up by their own flaming petards of assholery. What is next? Banning cinnamon hearts for being tools of the devil (who knew?)? Expressing love and affection is obviously evil evil evil and must be stopped at all costs.
“On Tuesday, the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, a major religious party, condemned Valentine’s Day in Peshawar for encouraging “immodesty” and threatened to shut down any celebrations if law enforcement agencies failed to take action first.”
Tell me again about how we need to have more respect for religious freedom and ideas.
“The growing outrage against Valentine’s Day, which has been observed in recent years by young couples in Pakistan’s major cities, is the latest sign of the culture clash underway in Pakistan. Condemnation of the day has not been restricted to Peshawar, a conservative city in the northwest. A group of female students at the University of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest public university, called on their peers to mark the day by wearing the hijab. Anti-Valentine’s Day billboards also sprang up this week in the city’s affluent, Westernized neighborhoods.”
Woo! Let’s embrace dehumanizing garments to show how awesomely modest and “god approved” we are. See also how god thinks our testimony is worth about half of a man’s. I’m pretty sure that by embracing the hijab and other allah-approved rituals is the same as pressing the “I win” button for women because further investing in the system of your oppression is totally-awesomely-effective!
“On Wednesday, the government joined the call: Media companies across the country received notices from the media regulatory authority warning them not to broadcast programs promoting Valentine’s Day — which, according to the letter, is “not in conformity to our religious and cultural ethos” and is “perceived as a source of depraving, corrupting and injuring morality of Pakistani youth.” The last-minute timing of the notice, and its claim that it was responding to the complaints of a “large segment of society,” reeked of an official attempt to play it safe ahead the general election, which is expected to take place in May.”
Because traditional practices like oh say, honour killings, acid attacks and gang-rape are in conformity with religious and cultural ethos. Your noble treatment of people in accordance with cultural and religious “ethos” is nothing to proud of and ejecting these cancerous notions should be fracking priority Number One.
“In November, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority ordered mobile phone service providers to discontinue cheap, late-night calling rates, arguing that these special packages promoted “vulgarity” and went against “social norms” by enabling teenagers to spend hours on the phone with their boyfriends and girlfriends.”
People talking? To Each Other? Outrageous! Dear North American Religious Nutters: this is what your family values/religious society looks like in action (the only sane reaction to people wanting to be more religiously orientated looks something like this). You are worried about a loss of rights and religious freedom now? Let’s elect more idjit theocrats and see how much of our freedom we can sacrifice to make your imaginary friends happy.
“But in trying to clamp down on young love, Pakistan’s conservatives are fighting a losing battle. Having earned the legal right in 2003 to marry without their guardians’ consent, Pakistani women are increasingly risking everything — even their lives — to marry men of their choosing, not their family’s. The ability to mingle via Facebook or in online chat rooms is also leading to soaring numbers of “Internet marriages” between Pakistani youths.”
At least in this Disservice there is a happy ending. :)
Philosophy is/has been described as the root of all bullshite, and it is a fact that BS can baffle brains. The religiously orientated, faced with an ever increasing secular reality, can and will grasp at all straws in order to make their ooga-booga based reality seem reasonable and not a reason to be laughed at.
Variants of the Ontological argument fly thick and fast, just waiting to trip up the unprepared. Fear the the BS no longer as this tidy chunk of youtube education will inoculate you and provide the means to show your opponent that, once again, they are wrong.
I’d like to make the Disservice your point of contact for identifying and mercilessly mocking all of the whigged-out religious tom-foolery that exists out there. The idea that a cloth has the power to cure cancer is ludicrous on its own. Worse, mated with crass commercialism that some churches have instituted, make the whole church based prayer – cloth industry morally repugnant on just about every level.
Profiting by selling false hope to dying people is just wrong. Just another shining example of what jebus can do for you…for a price. Yet another fine example of unethical behaviour on the part of some christian churches.
A bit of a different tack today on the Sunday Disservice, but I think you’ll like what you see. One of the selling points of religious belief is the “spiritual-transcendental” angle; being a part of something that is bigger than you and yet speaks to you in a very special way in your heart. The deluded would like you to believe that they have cornered the market on this experience. As usual, the reality-challenged have it wrong.
Benjamin Zander, explores the idea that classical music has this very same quality, to bring us the big picture experience that is in tune with our hearts, but instead of using magic and the Oooga-booga, he uses Chopin.
The TED talk that Zander hosts has nothing to do with the anti-religious preamble I’ve raised, but I’m thinking that Chopin and other classical music, is a great short cut for experiencing an important part of spiritual life without all the frippery associated with dedicated religious belief.
Well. I’m glad to see the Catlicks coming around on such an important issue to women and their rights. This is an object lesson for the deluded pro-life movement. Your fetus worshipping is useful for whipping up the frenzy and getting people all frothy, but when serious issues come, its time for you to sit the frack down and shut the frack up on cue while the adults talk about the serious issues.
From the Alter.net article –
[…]
And all of this—all of it—goes back to the Church’s insistence that life begins with your very first hell-worthy dirty thought and must be protected at all costs, despite all consequences, including, of course, the consequence of dead women, whose lives are not nearly as valuable as the “life” of an unborn fetus. In just the past year, the Church has called upon its faithful followers to march, to starve themselves, to go to jail, to even take up arms—all to protect those fetuses. No exceptions. None. Not if the fetus is already dead inside the womb. Not if the fetus is going to kill the actual living woman carrying it. No goddamned exceptions EVER.
Well, except for one: when it’s going to cost the Church money.
Turns out, when a man sues a Catholic hospital for malpractice because his wife and the twins she was carrying inside her died when she turned up in the emergency room and her doctor never bothered to answer a page—well, things get a little tricky. Yes, the Catholic hospital adheres to the strict Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church, as set forth by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. And yes, those directives include the claim that “[t]he Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn” and a mandate to uphold “the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death.'” But come on. That obviously does not apply when Catholic Health Initiatives, the Church-affiliated organization that runs the Church-affiliated St. Thomas More Hospital where a young woman and her two unborn fetuses died, is the lead defendant in a lawsuit:
Instead, they are arguing state law protects doctors from liability concerning unborn fetuses on grounds that those fetuses are not persons with legal rights.
As Jason Langley, an attorney with Denver-based Kennedy Childs, argued in one of the briefs he filed for the defense, the court “should not overturn the long-standing rule in Colorado that the term ‘person,’ as is used in the Wrongful Death Act, encompasses only individuals born alive. Colorado state courts define ‘person’ under the Act to include only those born alive. Therefore Plaintiffs cannot maintain wrongful death claims based on two unborn fetuses.”
Thank you, counselor, for totally undermining everything the Catholic Church has ever said about women and health care and fetuses and the “sanctity of life,” just to save a buck, thereby confirming how very empty and meaningless all that rhetoric really is. Praise the Lord.
Enjoy this by the numbers take down of religious tomfoolery. The Thinking Atheist’s video is a wonderful reference for everyone who has to deal whatever happens to be the religious lie of the day. Failing that, one could just dig the groovy ’70’s vibe going on throughout the video.
Allow me to expand on how the religious abuse, fold, spindle, and mutilate science as seen by Potholer54.
These people are in desperate need reality. The god-goggles need to go, the portcullis of faith needs to be lifted, the cathedral needs repurposing into a useful fixture of society.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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