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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.
Sometimes we forget that despite all the bullshit, all the division, all the scorn, human beings can come together and create beautiful acts that fly in the face of all the shite we put up with in our regular day to day existence. I recently had the great privilege of participating in a choir that performed Carl Jenkins Adiemus.
The piece is simple, but powerful. You find a way to move through each phrase with energy and the intent to infuse your sound into Jenkins work. Adiemus sounds great from the audience, but the experience pales compared to being inside the choir singing it.
Find your community chorus, get involved, be with people and make music.
So Say We All.
The neat thing about bad arguments is that usually they are layered in thick and fast that you don’t catch them the first time,so you have to slow down and rewind the tape to see the intersectionality of wrongness and then unweave the fail.
Today’s disservice is dedicated to a post by the Wayward Catholic, ostensibly extending the putrefied olive branch of religion to those who are drifting (I imagine it is code for people who are starting to think for themselves) to get them back into the feckless fold.
A noble cause indeed. But hey, if the arguments are good, then maybe there is a good point to be had. Riiiiight…anyhow, lets see how the Wayward Catholic does in his(assumption of gender) post “Killing is wrong“.
The argument was if I supported such a law and the law passed then that would be forcing my opinion on others. Of course the commentor fails to see that the opposite must also be true as well. Passing any law ca be considered one group of people forcing their opinion on another group.
Individual laws are forcing their “opinion” on other people. Cannibals are rightly annoyed that they cannot go to the local Uncle Wally’s and begin the all-U-can eat feast. Laws are in place in society to preserve order and promote fair treatment in society and usually, said laws are enacted based their utility and on the needs of said society.
A perfect example is the HHS contraception mandate. This mandate forces all employers (with a very narrow exception) to provide contraception, sterilizations and “morning after” pills to their employees whether they have a religious objection to them or not.
Ah, the persecution!! Not being able to propagate outdated and irrational beliefs on society, the horror! Welcome to civilization that does not kowtow to your magic book and delusional mind-set. Women use contraception and should have access to it when they need it, at any time. Reproductive consequences for women are serious and they need to have all the options available to them.
But then this is the typical secular argument. They see all issues from one side, and one side only. If they think something is right, it is right, end of story, and anything which has to do with religion isn’t right so it is bad and must be destroyed.
What a marvellous case of projection you have going there, never mind the sweeping generalizations about all “secular arguments”. I imagine the problem for you is that often, secular arguments are based on evidence and verifiable facts, rather than on mythology, magic and dogmatic adherence to bronze age bugaboo.
The fact is, access to contraception is good for society. The above links are just a small sample of the evidence that supports the benefits of contraception in society. Just because you do not believe in contraception does not mean contraception is a bad thing. You have every right to express your opinion. However, unsubstantiated opinion is pretty much next to worthless when it comes to the law and moral issues in society.
Belief weighs heavily in the next paragraph, a paragraph one sees much to often from those who worship the almighty fetus. But hey one more reiteration won’t hurt, especially when its being used for educational purposes.
Even though killing and murder is wrong they will defend it, doing everything they can to “soften” the fact that it is murder, that they are taking a life. An innocent one at that, one who doesn’t have a “choice”.
Killing and murder is generally wrong, especially when dealing with people. Blastocycsts, fetuses, fertilized eggs et cetera are not people. I’m going to assume, for the sake of argument that you think that “life” begins conception. It is an erroneous, problematic assumption at best. So, what this comes down to is whether or not you think women get to makes choices about what goes on in their body.
You don’t get a say if you need a kidney and I happen to have one that is suitable to donate. Bodily autonomy does not magically stop when it comes to uteri. What goes on in a woman’s uterus falls under the same measure, her body, her choice. It starts and ends there.
We can always thank religion for continuing the war on women.
I like the idea of religion. Faith comforts the mind, providing a solid defense against the existential questions that linger for all of us*. Why not surrender to the warm and fuzzy religious mentality that has all the tough questions answered with a certainty that even the best argumentation could not hope to shake?
Wouldn’t that be nice? Consider the christian get out of jail card…as long as you believe in jebus, you can be as much as an arsehole here on earth as you’d like, and still get to be with the angels when the curtain closes. Merrily murder your way into the big book of genocidal low lights; slaughter till the rivers run red with your dastardly intent, you’ll be fine as long as you believe.
Absolute certainty of anything is an abomination. – I love sounding like the middle-aged Obi-wan from episode 3 as be goes about condemning Anakin for his misdeeds and evil ways. Battering my brain from his tortured speech, “Only Sith speak in absolutes…” Thank you baron von paradox for that lovely chunk of wisdom, your concern is noted. One could read more into the script seeing Obi-wan as flirting with the absolute and the folly of adhering to any particular absolute statement. Do not count on that sort of existential angst and analysis from Lucas, as his idea of good script writing seems to be based on feeding his cats alphabet soup and then flinging their shit into the nearest word-processor.
I digress.
I’m pissed off that believing in a religion is such a shitty bargain. Too much is lost in making deals with imaginary people and following absolute edicts that are oh so kindly translated for us peons so they make sense to us. It is a rigged game, like much of life and it produces only a few winners and many, many, losers. Entering games not rigged by me just is not worth my time.
Stupid religion, I must not be stupid, depressed, stressed, defenseless, gullible, indoctrinated, (insert broken person adjective here) enough to want to embrace your shit-encrusted-ass-peanut of a bargain.
Lucky me.
* Those of us who have more than two neurons to rub together and the time to contemplate what life is.
A now classic video by Potholer54 showing with considerable acumen how wrong the Flood myth and by extension, biblical creation, is.
Watch what happens when you mix broken foreign policy with religion…
“One of Pakistan’s most influential clerics has renounced his support for polio immunisation, claiming that the programme is a cover for American spies.”
Pakistan needs less of this particular brand of religious stupidity. The stupid is compounded by the bullshite American cloak and dagger games being played in Pakistan.
“But now he says he cannot back the policy after it emerged that the CIA had used a fake hepatitis drive to hunt for Osama bin Laden last year.
Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who organised the vaccination campaign, has been sentenced to 33 years in prison and his actions caused a wave of paranoia about foreign aid workers.”
Thank you America your botched war is screwing up yet another county in your drive to be the imperial power of this century as well. Newsflash – China isn’t going to let you; get over yourself and stop killing brown people for not agreeing to be vassals.
“Pakistan is one of three countries where the disease remains endemic. Only 22 cases have been reported this year – compared with 59 in the same period in 2011 – and hopes were high that it could soon be declared polio free.
However, hard-line clerics have long opposed what they suspect is a Western conspiracy against Muslims. As a result health workers carefully cultivated moderate leaders, who issued fatwas – or religious rulings – declaring vaccination to be in line with Islamic teaching.”
There is just so much wrong going on here. Vaccinations to eradicate polio are a fundamentally good idea. This fundamentally good idea is trumped though when Western spy agencies use them to further their foreign policy goals. Then you get backlash like this:
But Haq said that it made no sense for foreign agencies to keep children free from disease while bombing Pakistan.
“If you people are that much curious about the health of people living over there, it means that you are keeping these people alive just to kill them by drones,” he said.
The sad fatalism of marginalized people. Wrong, but understandable given the circumstances. Never forget that we are categorically *not* the good guys for much of the world. If we’d taken the time and effort simply not to perpetuate misery and destruction on poor coloured folk we might actually have some respect in the world.



Your opinions…