An Un-Joke

John of Patmos (writing Revelation): 

Lord, the End Times will be signaled by trumpets?

God: 

No - Trump/Pence

John: 

Oh, right - Trumpets

God: 

Fine - whatever - they'll know.

hat tip = Jay Smooth

Trump's "Religion"

Kind of an oldie-but-a-goodie today:

But the god-knobbers got in line anyway.

About Those Evangelicals

The best way to get a clear understanding of what these guys are really saying is to substitute "me" or "my" or "mine" whenever you hear the word "god". 

Via Mock Paper Scissors, here's Reverend Fishdicks:

Kids These Days

WaPo:

Students at Liberty University have issued a statement against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as young conservatives at colleges across the state reconsider support for his campaign.

A statement issued late Wednesday by the group Liberty United Against Trump strongly rebuked the candidate as well as the school’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., for defending Trump after he made extremely lewd comments about women in a 2005 video. The students wrote that Falwell’s support for Trump had cast a stain on the school’s reputation.

“We are Liberty students who are disappointed with President Falwell’s endorsement and are tired of being associated with one of the worst presidential candidates in American history,” the statement said. “Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him. … He has made his name by maligning others and bragging about his sins. Not only is Donald Trump a bad candidate for president, he is actively promoting the very things that we as Christians ought to oppose.”

--and also too--

The Liberty University student manifesto against Trump comes as college Republican groups across the country reconsider support for the candidate. On Tuesday the University of Virginia College Republicans announced that the group voted to rescind its endorsement of his candidacy for president. The chairman of the College Republicans at Hampden-Sydney College, Tanner Beck, posted a statement on Facebook noting that Trump “has gone from simply being an embarrassment to our party, to a potentially permanent stain on our brand and our country.”

The statement was posted online as a petition

I'm not holding out a lot of hope that this will flip any given Trumpster, and I don't really give a rat's ass what anybody thinks their imaginary friend has to say about politics (or anything else for that matter).  

That said, maybe I can take it as a good sign that some of these young adults are forming political identities that aren't simply Red vs Blue and My-Team-No-Matter-What, in spite of the submissive authoritarian crap that gets drilled into them at a "Religious University".

Realistically, some of these "kids" will go on to become the next buncha blue-nosed pinch-faced purity warriors that plague every system everywhere, but some will also grow into regular human-type people who can change things where they are with the tools they have at hand.

A guy can hope, can't he?

Each New Thing

Almost every day, when the newest horrifyingly right radical thing drops into our laps, I think, "this has to be as bad as it gets".  And every time, all I have to do is wait for a day (sometimes less), and along comes something to top it.

Leggings and gerbils, Dave Daubenmire (via Right Wing Watch):

Tim Wise (FB):

America will never be great until people who think like this are marginalized and removed from any position of authority or influence over anything besides their little pathetic tabernacles to the Lord...sadly, large numbers of men think this way and have quite a bit of power and influence.. And that is one of the reasons we can't have nice things. Time for men whose masculinity isn't threatened by strong and powerful women to stand up and demand that men like this are a relic of the past and should be relegated to it...like museum relics.

Ben Carson

It comes down to acknowledging that you're pushing for a Theocracy, Ben.  And so, in light of the fact that Government-by-Religion is expressly prohibited in our constitution, I have to ask: Why do you hate America, Dr Carson?

  

Slammin' Sam

Samantha Bee

A Glimmer

Saudi Arabia has roving bands of Morality Police with the power to beat up citizens they deem not behaving as good little Wahabis.

A judge in Kentucky decided he could refuse to officiate at a civil wedding ceremony because the couple didn't mention God in their vows.

Bands of psychotically religious assholes do all manner of shitty things to people everywhere, in the name of their love and devotion for any of a dozen versions of the one true merciful and loving god.

Fuck 'em.

Still, there's this tiny glimmer of hope in USAmerica Inc.

  

Let's Throw A Study Into It

Nobody west of about Cairo knows more than this guy - Juan Cole:

1. Terrorism or hirabah is forbidden in Islamic law, which groups it with brigandage, highway robbery and extortion rackets– any illicit use of fear and coercion in public spaces for money or power. The principle of forbidding the spreading of terror in the land is based on the Qur’an (Surah al-Ma’ida 5:33–34). Prominent [pdf] Muslim legal scholar Sherman Jackson writes, “The Spanish Maliki jurist Ibn `Abd al-Barr (d. 464/ 1070)) defines the agent of hiraba as ‘Anyone who disturbs free passage in the streets and renders them unsafe to travel, striving to spread corruption in the land by taking money, killing people or violating what God has made it unlawful to violate is guilty of hirabah . . .”

2. Terrorism is above all murder. Murder is strictly forbidden in the Qur’an. 5:53 says, “… whoso kills a soul, unless it be for murder or for wreaking corruption in the land, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind; and he who saves a life, it shall be as if he had given life to all mankind,” Qur’an 6:151 says, “and do not kill a soul that God has made sacrosanct, save lawfully.” (i.e. murder is forbidden but the death penalty imposed by the state for a crime is permitted).

The list has 10 items on it, and they all seem pretty clear.

But there's this weird thing going on right now.  The debate over what is or isn't Islam - or Christianity or any other religion - is starting to sound a lot like one giant logical fallacy of "No True Scotsman", with a dash of "False Equivalence".

ISIL is to Islam what the KKK is to Christianity.

Real Christians don't fire bomb Planned Parenthood Clinics, the same as Real Muslims don't hijack airplanes and crash them into American office buildings.

In the end, we're back arguing degrees of fucked-up-edness concerning the other guy's religion.  We're only saying this or that religious nonsense is less bad than this or that other religious nonsense.  --Update: It's all nonsense, and btw, it's not the same as having to choose the lesser of two evils.  Politics gets evil enough all by itself - we don't need the extra layers of bullshit that (really) only religion can bring.

Mostly, we gotta stop pretending that anybody's religion makes for good government.

Government is about law, and law is about what you can prove, out in the open, where everybody can see it.

Let's get the debate back where it belongs.

Go Baphamet

The Christianistas continue to trip over their own dicks.  They seem to have become completely isolated inside their little bubble.  They've sold themselves on the rhetorical non-sense of "America is a Christian nation and the federal government was founded on Judeo-Christian values etc etc etc".  They believe it, and they're convinced everybody else believes it too, and so they're just charging ahead (like Greaves says) without stopping to think that the all-important First Amendment thing that gives them the right to preach their version of "the truth" cuts the same for everybody else too.

From Raw Story:

This week, the state of Missouri’s draconian 72-hour waiting period for an abortion was in the spotlight again when a conservative state legislator made it clear he would try and stop a graduate student from studying the wait period’s impact on women.

But conservative Christians who have been pushing these ideologically-driven policies may have created their own demise without realizing it. The Satanic Temple sprung up to challenge the attempts to turn the United States into a Christian theocracy. And as the constitutional activists point out, they fight theocracy using the same laws and legal arguments pushed by conservative Christians.

“We’re fighting an enemy now that hasn’t had to think things through, and that’s what gives us such an advantage,” said Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves in an interview with The Raw Story. “They’re used to being the only beneficiaries of the privileges that they have fought for, and that kind of monopoly has made them complacent, stupid and weak, and it’s just made it that much easier for us to come in and assert ourselves the way we have.”

As for me, on the whole Abortion Issue, I think I know maybe 4 things:

1. A caterpillar is not a butterfly.
2. A tadpole is not a frog.
3. A fertilized chicken egg is not a chicken.
4. Nothing that's going on in my daughter's uterus is any of your god-dammed business, so fuck the fuck off, motherfucker.

Redefining

Here's a weird little blast from the past - and there's a bit in here that's been eatin' at me for a while.

First - at about 6:00, when Huck makes the claims about how he wants his faith to be questioned?  That sounds a whole lot like good old Sales Training shit - I think he 'welcomes the feedback' so he can be looking for ways to anticipate the objections and get a few plausible-sounding bromides handy for rebuttal.

But that ain't the big one - here's the big one - starting around the 8-minute mark:
Guys like Huckabee are always slicing it nice and thin when it comes to the question of an all-loving god, especially when you try to make the point about sin and evil and why are there so many shitty people doing so many shitty things?  If god is god, then why do we have to fix all this shit?  The apologists always flop straight over into the Free Will of the Godly Volunteer thing - god loves us so he set it up so we can choose our fate by choosing to love god back or to reject god's love - and after all, if he forces his love on us, then he'd be raping us blah blah blah.  

Wait just one fuckin' minute, bub.

Problem - rape isn't only a situation where the rapist physically assaults the victim.  There's that little thing called coercion too.  And that becomes a huge problem if you then ask, "Isn't god really trying to force himself on us by threatening to send us to hell for an eternity of suffering if we spurn his advances?"

Set aside for a minute the bullshit deflection that "we decide to send ourselves to hell if we decide not to love god", and let's concentrate on the real point.  The real point here is that now we've got a Beyond-Even-Bill-Cosby level problem with a Rapist God - and btw, if Mary really didn't have much choice about whether or not she'd go along with the idea of getting knocked up by a coercive god, then doesn't that make Jesus the product of rape?  And then, all of a sudden, we've got the Son Of God born of sin - and holy fuck, man - this is  some kinda big fuckin' trouble right here.

Enter the TheoCons.  How many Repubs have found themselves in hot water because some dumbass thing or another fell outa their tater traps when they were trying to make a point about rape?

They needed to save Jesus so they needed a new definition for rape, and they decided to hide these cynical maneuverings and manipulations by fucking with the rights of women to make their own decisions for themselves(?)  

And they've been pullin' this kinda shit on our time, on our dime.

Seriously, guys - what the fucking fuck? 

Today's Vast RW Conspiracy

That's been rattling around in my head for a while now. So why does Limbaugh feel the need to slag NASA for finding water on Mars?  

I'm thinkin' a couple or three things here:

1- He has to push back against the normal tendency to give Obama credit for anything (it happened on his watch, so yeah).

2- If there's life on Mars, and it confirms an already-known-as-probable connection to life forms here on Earth, then it further erodes (ie: finally and completely dismantles) the bible's creation myth; and there goes sin; there goes the redeemer; there goes the religion - poof it's all gone.

3- If they can't find some kind of specious denial, then it all plays against the "conservative" strategy to move us closer to authoritarian rule which depends on blending church with state (see #2 above).

But then (not to give y'all whiplash or anything by swerving violently), I gotta ask, why are the wingnuts so strident about "fighting radical Islam"?  Why are the "threats" always Iran and ISIS and al-Qaeda, instead of the real ones like a resurgent Imperial Russia or Global Corporatism or the crashing biosphere?

I think what we're looking at here is pretty much the same old game of Fear Mongering, but nobody's gonna get much traction from the Arms Race / Missile Gap thing, plus this is the age of Branding & Differentiation, so they have to transition to something more topical and up-to-date, so we get something like, "What we have here is a Theocracy Gap - we can't afford to let those Moozlum bastards get ahead of us on this!"

People who're supposed to know about such things are telling us that the governments that're more authoritarian will be better able to react to the enormous shit wave that's beginning to swamp the world because of Climate Change.  The near-total disruption of everything we think of as stable and permanent; all those systems of Politics and Economics and Civilized Societies; all of that will change in a big way, and a shitload of that change will not be for the better.

Controlling the power of the government is the goal for these guys (btw - fuck Godwin, I'll go with Fascism - or TheoFascism if you prefer - on this one); theocracy being both the means to that end, and the mask of benevolence necessary to rationalize and excuse the brutality that always follows.

They don't like democracy. The don't trust us with our own governance. They insist on our complacency and our compliance, which makes us complicit in our own downfall.

And now, for your dining and dancing pleasure, here's a quick look at Proto-Limbaugh and the original Dittohead.

If it was any less tragic, it wouldn't be so fucking funny.

Today In Stoopid

The Super Blood Moon got some folks pretty spooked, I guess:

The AP said it’s unclear how many Mormons are buying into the end-of-the-world prophecy, but leaders of the church were concerned enough to issue the statement assuring them that the world is not about to end.

Preparedness is one of the tenets of the Mormon faith, which believes that a period of disasters and tribulations will precede the second coming of Jesus Christ. Many Mormon-built homes in Utah and other southwestern states feature special built-in shelves for rice, flour, canned goods and other nonperishable supplies.

The pronouncement by the church, said Patrick Mason — chair of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University in California — indicates that fear of the End Times must be fairly pervasive among Mormon families if church elders felt the need to address it.

“For it to filter up to that level and for them to decide to send out a policy letter means that they felt there was something they needed to tamp down on,” said Mason.

Sometimes I wonder why you'd spend time or effort telling these pea-brains to get ready for the shit when ya gotta know you'll have to talk 'em down off the ledge when they get all worked up and thinking the shit you've been "warning" them about is here and real and happening.

But then I remember this is all part of the big bamboozle anyway, so it's just the cost of doin' bidness.

These particular believers are so thoroughly hornswoggled they're wearing magic underwear.  So I'm thinking it comes as no surprise to church execs when they hear the faithful are willing to buy into some bullshit about the moon.  And of course it's easily debunkable, but why would the rubes not believe it when they've been very well taught to be totally committed to staying ignorant and superstitious?

Satan's greatest trick was convincing us that the people who insist that Satan exists will deal honestly with us if we just give them enough money.

And I don't really have to make this last little connection for anybody, right?

But Then This

Just wondering if there would be a circumstance under which I'd support religion getting in the way of government employees doing their jobs.

And the answer is actually pretty simple.  Yes, but as with all Civil Disobedience, I can be on your side only as long as you're going to accept full responsibility and you're ready to pay the price in terms of arrest, jail and fines.  

Then we'll work on changing the law - and we'll be doing it right.  We won't flat out disobey, rationalizing it with god-knobbery, and expecting total impunity because we have friends with large weapons and small vocabularies.

Today's Bandwagon

Yeah, I know - it left the barn and is long gone.  Sometimes it takes me a while.

Today's Tweet

Protestors are now calling for the firing of deputies issuing marriage licenses. pic.twitter.com/ZBrNGNvLZG

— Victor Puente (@thevictorpuente) September 9, 2015

So that's kinda where we are?  The point where the rubes are convinced that Kim Davis isn't the one going against the law - it's the cops and the judges, and everybody else who's not willing to accept their Brand-X Knock-off Sharia?

Now, you can go ahead and try to make the Both Sides argument by saying 'the libruls' think the cops and the judges in Ferguson (eg) are the bad guys, and so yeah, it all evens out.  Sadly, that sounds plausible because we've internalized that kind of paralysis. We've allowed the Opinion Pimps and their Press Poodles and their Coin-Operated Politicians to use our sense of fairness against us for political gain.  

The very thing that's at the core of our strength as the Exceptional Nation is now turned against us and becomes our greatest weakness.  Oh dear, what're we to do?  How will we ever figure this out and get a handle on what's real and what isn't? 

Chill, Sparky.

Here's the thing that we just can't quite get each other to remember about the shit we were supposed to learn in 9th grade Civics class.  You know - way back when school was a place where ya learned a coupla things about how to know what the fuck is goin' on?  Yeah that.  Anyway, the question is: who's following the guiding principles of the US Constitution?  

• everybody's supposed to be treated the same
• we're gonna be a nation of laws, not men
• nobody gets to take their religion and turn it into law 

All of which is intended to help us keep our personal shit separate from our government shit; by giving us a kind of simple bench mark for when we need to figure out what's best for the most while maintaining Equal Protection for as many of us as possible.

The cops in Ferguson failed to fulfill their obligations under their oath by engaging in selective enforcement of the law, and then they allowed it to degenerate into an extortion racket, which is crazy stoopid understandable because if you're not willing to see that the first part is pretty fucked up, then how ya gonna not go full-on-rat-bastard-straight-outa-The-Godfather-crooked-cop?  Seems like a logical progression.

As an agent of government, Davis failed to live up to her oath as well.  She refused to hold up her end of the deal.  That's against the law.  Denying US citizens their rights under the constitution is illegal, and it doesn't matter that your imaginary friend told you to do it, because that's fucking illegal too.

So, if ya wanna try to make that Both Sides argument here, then what you're doing is called False Equivalence/False Dichotomy, and I'm callin' bullshit on that.

Today's Nexus

Religion and Politics always seem to go together.  And they are both dangerous tools in the hands of unscrupulous people.

Here's Thermin Trees via YouTube, describing his own passage from curious child to indoctrinated teenager to clear-thinking adult.  The first half sounds like the very common history of most of us from that age group, but ya gotta stay with it until about 18:30 cuz that's where it kinda exploded up in my punkin' head - Religion and Politics are both very meticulous about devising systems intended to hide the manipulative lies on which their power structures are built.

Paraphrasing a little here:

What are the tools we use to detect lies?

a) the absence of confirming evidence

b) the presence of conflicting evidence

Loyalty (to faith or ideology) demands that we disregard:

a) the absence of confirming evidence

b) the presence of conflicting evidence

Today In Woo

(paraphrasing):

"Teaching one religion to children is called indoctrination.  Teaching all religions to children is call inoculation." --Matt Dillahunty

Here's what bugs me about the religiousness of a certain brand of TheoPolitics in USAmerica Inc right now:

Kids go off to school and they learn about Evolution, which eventually and necessarily requires them to question their religious training, especially if it's been all about Gardens and talking snakes and Jesus walking his pet velociraptor in the park etc.  Well, sometimes that leads to trouble because their parents have been so busy trying to make sure those kids are securely bubble-wrapped in dogma, they're gonna make sure the next school board meeting turns into Night Of The Living Dead.

And yes, you have the right to know what's going on in the classroom, and yes, you have the right to be heard when the curriculum decisions are made.  But let's not get off into the weeds, cuz here's the point: 

Let's say I've taught my kid that the world is a flat disc under a crystal dome, and it's being carried thru the ether on the back of giant turtle.  Then one day the kid comes home from school and he tells me his teacher has come up with this thing called "math" and he says the numbers lead him to believe the world is a sphere.  As a living thinking human possessed of a living thinking brain, do I conclude there must be something wrong with that stupid teacher and you can bet that stupid school's gonna hear from my lawyers?  Or am I honor-bound to consider that maybe there're things I don't know about - things I may find useful - and need to learn?

Science starts with a hypothesis, tests it against what's already been reasonably proven to be true, and then draws a conclusion as to what's now most likely to be true given this new information at this point in time.

Religion starts with an arbitrary conclusion, and then has to manufacture evidence (ie: make shit up) to support it.  The kicker: You don't really think it was simple coincidence that GW Bush made way too many of his disastrous policy decisions based on that model of "thinking" didya?

Ya'll knew all that already - but it bears repeating.

Openly Secular

Today's Charlie

Charlie Pierce is frequently amazing:

The rich person speaks and all are silent; they extol to the clouds what he says. The poor person speaks and they say, "Who is this fellow? "And should he stumble, they even push him down.  -- Sirach: 13:23

Today's Rudeness

The Rude Pundit; the whole Rude Pundit; and nuthin' but The Rude Pundit:

4/14/2015

Fuck Your Conscience; Do Your Job

Let us say, and why not, that you are a firefighter, the captain of the department in Sisterfuck, Arkansas, a little bit outside Little Rock, and, in your off-duty life, you're a good, loyal member of the Church of the Bloodiest Christ You've Ever Seen. At your church, Pastor Jamie Lee Closetqueer preaches about how abortion is just President Obama trying to murder Christians to make room for more Muslims. You never saw a Muslim abortion clinic, did you?

Now let us say, and, indeed, why not, that one night the Planned Parenthood in Little Rock goes up in flames and it's all hands on deck, all around the county, the area, even. Your squad is called into action before the whole complex, maybe the block, burns down. But you know that the Planned Parenthood does abortions. You're faced with a choice. Pastor Closetqueer's words echo in your ear: "If you support the sin, you are a sinner yourself." Do you tell your Sisterfuck squad to stand down, let it burn, let other firefighters handle it? Or do you go against your faith and do your goddamn job?

It's not a big leap from pharmacists to firefighters. Down the road a bit from Sisterfuck is Millegdeville, Georgia, where Brittany Cartrett had a miscarriage. She needed assistance passing the miscarried fetus, so her doctor prescribed her Misoprostol, a pill that would help her complete what had started naturally, if sadly. When her doctor called local Walmart to have it filled, the pharmacist on duty refused to do so because, as she later told Cartrett, "I couldn't think of a valid reason why you would need this prescription." Misoprostol can be used to induce abortion, which is why it would be effective after a miscarriage. When Cartrett explained why she needed it, the pharmacist said, "Well, I don't feel like there is a reason why you would need it, so we refused to fill it."

And it's perfectly fine because Georgia has a law that says if pharmacists think that someone's prescription violates their beliefs, they can refuse to fill it because of a conscience clause, which over 20 states have or are considering. In this case, that meant that, despite a doctor calling in the prescription, the pharmacist thought, "Abortin' babeez" and bugged out.

By the way, Brittany Cartrett is a devout Christian who once worked at the same Walmart. And her response to the ensuing controversy, which became known because of her Facebook post on it, is about as common sense as you can get: "The point is that she refused to fill it based on an assumption and that is not her job. Her job is to fill it. Not to make the decision as to why I needed it. There has to be a line drawn when it comes to stuff like this."

Cartrett also wrote, awesomely, "I don't care about an apology. I care about women going through one of the worst possible things that they could go through and to be judged and refused. And what if I was going to get it for an abortion? I don't personally believe in abortion, but I would never judge or disrespect someone who felt like that was the only choice they had. As a friend, I would try to advise alternative options. As a pharmacist? It's not my place."

When you're right, you're right. Conscience clauses when it comes to things like this are just impositions of one's religion on others. Do your fucking job. If you can't do your fucking job properly, find another fucking job. If your bullshit beliefs are going to prevent you from fulfilling basic duties, then get the fuck out of the public sector. Go work for a church. Just stay away from people who might need you to shut the fuck up and do the job. Conservatives like to talk about "special rights" for different groups. An exclusion from the duties of your profession is pretty much the picture book definition of "special rights."

It ain't just religion. In Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a school nurse refused to assist a middle school student and threw the girl out of her office. The girl's crime? She didn't stand during the Pledge of Allegiance, the loyalty oath students around the country are asked to recite every morning at their indoctrination center schools. Except, interestingly enough, the Pledge is voluntary, and the nurse is being investigated for abiding by her patriotic conscience. So there is a line.

When it comes to religion, though, that line is being erased. We are not far from just letting shit burn.