Today's Today

For all my nutty Christian friends - glad you're around,

and I'm gladder that you don't try to beat me over the head with it.

War Sucks

And "holy wars" suck the worst.

If you say atrocities committed in the name of religion can't be blamed on religion because it's an individual person committing the acts, then you can't credit religion as being the reason for a person's moral acts done in the name of religion.

“Ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion.”

--Sam Harris 

Hamas gang raped and beheaded women at rave massacre, fresh testimony reveals

Almost two months after the attack, the international community is beginning to act on reports of Palestinian sexual violence

Survivors of the Supernova massacre witnessed women being gang raped and beheaded, new testimony has revealed.

Yoni Saadon, who escaped execution by hiding underneath a stage, said: “I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her.

“She was screaming, ‘Stop it—already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head.

“I kept thinking it could have been one of my daughters. Or my sister—I had bought her a ticket but last minute she couldn’t come.”

Speaking to The Sunday Times at Sitria, a support area set up for festival survivors southeast of Tel Aviv, Saadon said he also witnessed the brutal murder of women who resisted Hamas attackers.

“They had caught a young woman near a car and she was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her,” he said.

“They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too.”

Discussing another woman who was killed in front of him, Saadon added: “She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too.

“I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying ‘I’m sorry’.”

Haim Outmezgine, commander of a special unit of Zaka, which collects the remains of the dead, told The Sunday Times it was clear Hamas terrorists aimed to sexually assault women.

“We collected 1,000 bodies in ten days from the festival site and kibbutzim,” he said.

“No one saw more than us. It was clear they were trying to spread as much horror as they could — to kill, to burn alive, to rape … it seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”

In one field, he said, he found the bodies of two girls with their legs apart who had both been shot in the head. One had her shorts ripped and had been shot in the vagina, the other had her jeans pulled down and bruises on her legs.

Architect Shari, who has volunteered at the Shura military base to help identify and prepare corpses for burial, said she was horrified at the scale of the violence inflicted upon women by Hamas.

“Opening the body bags was scary as we didn’t know what we would see,” she told The Sunday Times.

“They were all young women. Most in little clothing or shredded clothing and their bodies bloodied particularly round their underwear and some women shot many times in the face as if to mutilate them.

“Their faces were in anguish and often their fingers clenched as they died. We saw women whose pelvises were broken. Legs broken. There were women who had been shot in the crotch, in the breasts … there seems no doubt what happened to them.”

Israeli police investigating sexual violence committed on October 7 say they have collected thousands of statements, photographs and video clips documenting Hamas’s crimes.

Shelly Harush, the police commander leading the probe, said: “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.

The fresh revelations come as mounting evidence of brutal atrocities committed against women on October 7 has spurred the international community to react.

57 days after the massacres, UN Women have issued a statement condemning the "brutal attacks" launched by Hamas against Israel.

The international body said: “We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks. This is why we have called for all accounts of gender-based violence to be duly investigated and prosecuted, with the rights of the victim at the core.”

Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, who spent 12 years as a committee member on the UN convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, told The Sunday Times: “This is the statement they should have issued two months ago. “It’s mindblowing.

“We were there for our sisters when terrible things happened across the ocean, when they took away abortion rights in US, the killing of women in Iran, the abduction of Yazidis … but with us they looked away and I can’t think of a reasonable answer.”

Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, has meanwhile spent the last two days in Israel meeting survivors and hostage families.

He says he will investigate crimes within his jurisdiction, which is expected to include sexual violence.

Today's Jesus Thing

The guys who wrote the Gospels (first-hand eye witness accounts that were written only a hundred or two hundred years after the fact) - those guys knew they were spinning some big-time yarns.

They knew what the Old Testament prophesies were - eg: the messiah will enter Jerusalem on a particular sabbath riding an ass - and they said so: "We're telling you this is what happened because it fulfills the prophesy."

But the kicker - what I'm please to have realized today - (paraphrasing) "The virgin birth was God encoding himself into humanity." And suddenly something seems pretty clear:

Bible bear a striking and undeniable resemblance to Greek mythology.

God encodes himself into humanity through the virgin birth - just like Zeus takes the form of a swan so he can fuck Leda.

Everything is derivative. Everything evolves from and into something else.

The Lion Man

About 40,000 years ago, somebody carved a figure - a fetish - from a piece of mammoth ivory.

The thinking is that of course it's a religious thing. Cuz people back then were stupid and gullible. They couldn't possibly be trying to make sense of their own identities and the place in nature they occupy - contemplating the beginnings of life itself by thinking logically. It just had to be religion, because - well, it just had to be religion.

Maybe - just maybe - they were thinking about evolution instead of some bullshit religious fantasy. And maybe one of the really smart ones came up with the idea of visual aids in an attempt to explain how one life form leads to another life form.

It's just a guess. It's just my own ego telling me that as stupidly as we behave sometimes, humans are really pretty smart, and if we can figure out how to side-step the religious mumbo jumbo and the political fog that always accompanies religion, then maybe we can move this thing along a little better that what we've done so far.

Just sayin'.

Overheard

Religion:

Why do they love me and hate you?

Atheism:

Because you're a comforting lie,

and I'm the painful truth.

Get Thee Behind Me, Bitch

Father Ed - Nova Scotia

If I'd had a guy like this guy back when I was a smart-ass mouthy teenager, maybe I'd've known more than I knew, and maybe it takes not quite so fucking long for me to get a few things figured out.

This Headline

About a month ago in Spanish News Today:

(the site doesn't allow for any of my copy-n-paste shenanigans)

Today's Reddit etc

A little something from a guy who's my kinda Christian.

And one from the Catholics:

Today's Message

We have to develop a relationship with ourselves as we grow up, but religion relies on self-infantilization - on instigating and reinforcing the deliberate insistence that we must refuse to be the adult in that relationship.

This is the first time I've ever heard a preacher articulate that.

The function of the Christ is not to rescue the sinners, but to empower you, and to call you to be more deeply and fully human than you've ever realized there was the potential within you to be.

Maybe salvation needs to be conveyed in terms of enhancing your humanity rather than rescuing you from it.

Thank God I'm An Atheist

If religion was actually perceived as helpful, it'd be goin' strong.

And it's not like some powerful new sloganeering campaign will fix what's wrong with it. 

The Hill:

The percentage of Americans who have membership in a house of worship has dropped below 50 percent for the first time in eight decades, according to a report released by Gallup on Monday.

U.S. church membership has steadily been declining for the past two decades. Before 2000, church membership had generally stayed around 70 percent from when Gallup began measuring it in the 1930s.

In 2020, membership reached an all-time low of 47 percent.

“The decline in church membership is primarily a function of the increasing number of Americans who express no religious preference,” Gallup notes in its report. “Over the past two decades, the percentage of Americans who do not identify with any religion has grown from 8% in 1998-2000 to 13% in 2008-2010 and 21% over the past three years.”

A small portion of the drop in membership is due to a decline in Americans who said they have formal church membership. From 1998 to 2000, 73 percent of religious Americans said they belonged to a church. That number has since dropped to an average of 60 percent of religious Americans.

Church membership is also strongly linked to age, Gallup notes. Among people born before 1946, 66 percent belong to a church with the share of people dropping as the generations progress. 58 percent of baby boomers, 50 percent of Generation X and 36 percent of Millennials report belong to a church.

However, regardless of generation, the share of U.S. adults who do not have a religious affiliation or belong to a church has continued to grow. The trend was also observed across all subgroups including men, women, Hispanics, political parties and region of the U.S.

"The U.S. remains a religious nation, with more than seven in 10 affiliating with some type of organized religion," the Gallup report reads. "However, far fewer, now less than half, have a formal membership with a specific house of worship. While it is possible that part of the decline seen in 2020 was temporary and related to the coronavirus pandemic, continued decline in future decades seems inevitable, given the much lower levels of religiosity and church membership among younger versus older generations of adults."

Today's Quote

Archibald McLeish

Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves.

It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the answers for everybody else.

Overheard

The Vatican has announced that Easter is canceled for 2020.
The Pope said, "Jesus can stay dead this year - we'll catch him up next time."

Today's Benediction

May god bless you with discomfort
at easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships,
so that you may live deep within your heart.

May god bless you with anger
at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

And may god bless you with enough foolishness
to believe you can make a difference in the world; to do what others claim can't be done;
to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.

Today's Today

"Good" Friday my ass.

One Way Or Another

If you install lightning rods on your church, how do you then expect your congregation to put their faith in what you're preaching?

But if you don't, and your church gets zapped, maybe that's god saying, "Get with the science, you stupid fucks."

Of course, no matter how it fails, faith will endure as long as believers insist on maintaining the requisite level of deliberate ignorance.

And a good preacher - like any good grifter - will always be able to deflect and change the subject so the questions that lead to uncomfortable conversations are put off long enough to be forgotten again.

Forgot His One-Iron

WALKER COUNTY, Ala. -- Around 12:30 Sunday afternoon, a call came into Walker County dispatchers regarding someone being struck by lightning.

The Argo Area Volunteer Fire Department responded to the Argo Church of God on Highway 78. When they arrived, they found Pastor Ricky Adams who had been hit by an indirect lightning strike.

Adams said he was about to lock the front door of the church, when lightning struck nearby, traveled through the ground and eventually shocked him. Argo Area Volunteer Fire Department Chief Terry Pickett said Adams was alert and talking when first responders arrived. Pickett added that church members were assisting Adams after it happened. Adams did not sustain any major injuries and did not need to be transported to the hospital.

WVIR NBC29 Charlottesville News, Sports, and Weather

Deep Thoughts

Today, your faith is known as religion.

Eventually, your religion will be known as mythology.

The Church Rears Up

Teach a Baptist to read, and you get a Methodist.
Send a Methodist to high school, and you get an Episcopalian.
Put an Episcopalian through Seminary, and you get an atheist, which means you've come full circle.

Because religious doctrine is an after-market accessory. Nobody's delivered with a factory-installed belief in spooks and pixies.

But anyway - at least the Methodists have been on the right side of history for a while.

Sam Hodges, UMC.org:

More than 600 United Methodist clergy and laity say they are bringing church law charges against U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a fellow United Methodist, over a zero tolerance U.S. immigration policy — a policy that includes separating children from parents apprehended for crossing into the U.S. illegally.

However, an authority on church history and polity said he’s unaware of a complaint against a lay person ever moving past the district level.

The group claimed in a June 18 statement that Sessions, a member of a Mobile, Alabama, church, violated Paragraph 2702.3 of the denomination’s Book of Discipline.

Specifically, the group accuses him of child abuse in reference to separating young children from their parents and holding them in mass incarceration facilities; immorality; racial discrimination and “dissemination of doctrines contrary to the established standards of doctrines” of The United Methodist Church.

All are categories listed in 2702.3 as chargeable offenses for a professing member of a local church.
- and -

The Book of Discipline allows for a church trial and even expulsion of a lay member, but the first step in a long process would be for the member’s pastor and district superintendent to solve the complaint through “pastoral steps,” Lawrence said.

“I’m not aware of any circumstance in the 50-year history of The United Methodist Church when a complaint against a lay person moved beyond the stage of its resolution by a district superintendent or a pastor,” he added.

Wright said the group’s goal in filing charges was to prompt such discussions.

“I hope his pastor can have a good conversation with him and come to a good resolution that helps him reclaim his values that many of us feel he’s violated as a Methodist,” Wright said.

He added: “I would look upon his being taken out of the denomination or leaving as a tragedy. That’s not what I would want from this.”

Wright said the complaint has been emailed to Sessions’ home church in Alabama, and to a Northern Virginia church that Wright said he understands Sessions regularly attends.

Sessions’ pastor at the Alabama church did not return calls.

A Brief Observation

The Popemobile is bulletproof.

Is this really the best example of faith in action?

hat tip = Bill Hicks

Oh, Those Moonies

"...they cling to guns or religion..."  Yeah - that stupid Obama guy.

Vox, Tara Isabella Burton:

As the debate over gun control raged across America in the wake of last month’s school shooting in Florida, a group of worshippers wearing bullet crowns and toting AR-15 rifles gathered in a Pennsylvania church this week to hold a “commitment ceremony” for about 250 couples.

The ceremony was held at the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania. The weapons, which Reuters reported were unloaded, were meant to represent the biblical “rod of iron” referenced in the Book of Revelation, used by God’s representative to dominate his enemies.

As the nearby Wallenpaupack Area School District moved its students to another school over concerns about the armed celebrants, church leaders argued for the power of guns to do God’s will — and protect the innocent. “Each of us is called to use the power of the ‘rod of iron’ not to arm or oppress as has been done in satanic kingdoms of this world, but to protect God’s children,” said the church leader, Rev. Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, in a statement. “If the football coach who rushed into the building to defend students from the shooter with his own body had been allowed to carry a firearm, many lives, including his own, could have been saved.”
One thing I noticed: in every picture I've seen so far, all of the AR15s are 'safed' with a zip tie through the receiver, making it almost impossible to load them with any ammo.

If the guns (and the gun owners) are blessed with ethereal powers for good, then earthly measures to ensure they don't fall into evil ways are totally unnecessary.

It's almost as if there's some kinda scam going on here.