I HATE Benetton

Benetton is the perfect exemplar of the decadent, self-loathing, euro-weenie, raised pinkie, Obama-funding, self-righteous, passive-aggressive Leftie-American-Douchebag-Liberal worldview.

This is the latest in Benetton’s “unhate” campaign. It arrives minutes after they apologized for portraying the Pope frenching a Muslim imam.

As readers of this blog know, I’m no fan of Jesus, and I feel kinda sentimental about Satan.

But I LOATHE the multi-culti, touchy-feely faggy Left. They seethe with subterranean hatred. For their rich daddies or their touchy-feely creepy mommies or because of their earned inferiority complexes and their dependence on entitlements and privileges they don’t understand much less would ever be willing to admit they get.

This Benetton ad is a HATE letter to Christians. If you don’t get that, you’re just another passive-aggressive asshat conformist piece of self-righteous American Liberal shit.

I am lucky enough to work in an open office, where collaboration is the raisin debt, but the actual result is everyone wearing noise-cancelling headphones so they can think straight occasionally. Friday, near end of the day, the subject turned to religion. There are 8 people in my little Den of Pandemonium. 6 were still at work when somebody said something along the lines of, Why the fuck would anyone still go to church for Christ’s sake?

As it turns out 2 people were church goers. They responded with grace (no pun intended) and dignity. The Jewish girl, siding with the majority, dissed her Bat Mitzvah as a huge pain in the ass what with all that Torah-memorizing and cantoring. She’s a nice girl. We applaud girl-courage so much because it is so rare. As the only serious atheist in the group, and I was still working, I chimed in occasionally to clarify concepts like “Original Sin” which 2 of the 6 had never even heard of.

To summarize, 3 of the 6 people there were, how shall I say this…unchurched? dechurched? If dechurched, I guess it’s 4 of 6 including me. I was the only one on the church-sucks side who had a clue about church. The rest were less educated about Protestants and Catholics than I am about the Oneida cult. As in, I know more about why Oneida flatware is sexy than they do about Jesus.

The Seattle liberals got rocked back on their heels thinking this was a Safe Zone to casually ridicule religious people. Oops. Now they know: Two of Them are less than 10 feet away from Enlightened Me every day. It would be great if next Monday were interesting, with some kind of walk of Liberal shame, but that won’t happen. Seattle liberals are nothing if not malleable pussies who don’t know how to apologize.

I didn’t help the religious people. They were doing fine on their own.

Thought experiment time:

Knowing this will help fuel assholes who will try to get this blog censored for racism, I’m going to make this analogy and ask these questions because race is the lens through which stupid liberals view everything these days, so it’s the best analogy to use to slap them across their sleepy stupid heads to try to wake them up:

Which of these two questions is more bigoted:

1. Why the fuck would anyone still go to church for Christ’s sake?
2. Why the fuck would anyone hire a nigger for Christ’s sake?

In case you’re not good at taking tests: They’re equally bigoted. Why aren’t they equally offensive? That’s not another test questions, except it’s a litmus test. If you don’t get that both those questions are equally offensive, you’re a bigoted asshole.

One of the guys who had left work already, who works in my 8-pack Of Noisy Hell, is black. I wonder how he would have responded if Question #2 had been asked in his presence. Do you think he would have gone into “I’m going to be reasonable, meek and mild and try to find common ground” mode like the outed Christians did?

Christians are the new gays. You can’t be sure if someone’s a closet Christian or gay at first glance. They sneak up on you and they pretend to be normal. Then suddenly they’re going to church or singing show tunes…gross!

Actually, Christians are the new black!

 

 

Who’s Crazy Now?

Christine O’Donnell, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved and Glenn Beck don’t believe in major parts of the mainstream theory of biological evolution. Since Crazy Chrissie opened up the subject in a recent senatorial debate, I’ve heard all three of the radio hosts defend her and deny cross-species evolution. Now, that’s a pretty central denial–they’re not just nit-picking around the edges.

I don’t think any of these three guys is stupid, but I have noticed that all of them seem to voluntarily give away IQ points when they start defending their religious beliefs. Especially Limbaugh–he’s truly a dunce on the subject, flailing away with the kind of equivocations and rhetorical strawman that you’d expect from a not-very-bright layman who’s really not all that interested in the subject of his own religion. I don’t know, but I suspect that Limbaugh’s piety is mostly lip service. It’s obvious Beck and Medved are sincere in their beliefs. Beck, especially, grapples pretty seriously with the issues. I think Medved is the brainest and certainly the most scholarly of the three, but not when he’s talking about religion.

Religious belief is psychodynamically similar to having loyalty to a sports team or, more gruesomely, to believing that there’s a holistic medicine out there that’s going to cure your cancer. Or maybe it’s like staying in denial about the clues that your spouse is cheating on you.

Religion appeals strongly to both hope and fear, salvation and damnation. The faithful are perpetually threatened with the eternal consequences of faltering in their beliefs. For orthodox Christians, doubts about the truth of the Bible scare them like doubts about your spouse’s fidelity threaten your marriage.

It really is a horrible mind-fuck to tell people that if they “lose their faith” they’ll go to hell. So no wonder that religious people get a little clueless and obtuse whenever they wander near any of the evidence that their faith is wrong.

It’s dawned on me lately that this is why orthodox Christians get so nuts about evolution that they start making up patently absurd counter-thories like intelligent design. There’s nothing in the theory of evolution that fundamentally disproves their faith…but it sure does remove most of the necessity for their faith in explaining the world they live in.

Christians have gotten over similar assaults by science before, but never without lasting damage. It’s hard for us today to comprehend the psychological impact of the Copernican revolution. The church just seems nuts to have wigged out over Galileo’s defense of Copernicus. But try to empathize: You’ve believed all your life that it’s a scientific fact that the universe revolves around the earth. Ponder the implications for a moment. If the earth really is the center of the universe, isn’t it hard to doubt that there is something hugely important about human life? And don’t the teaching of the church do a pretty decent job of explaining that? If you’re still having a hard time picturing the emotional impact of the heliocentric theory on 17th century believers, think about the impact the theory of evolution had on 19th and 20th century believers. Once more the metaphysical rug has been pulled out from under them. Another feature of reality that they thought was mysterious has evaporated. It’s disorienting and who would give up such an important psychological comfort without a fight?

Another thing that’s just dawned on me lately is how rude it is for the orthodox unbeliever establishment to shove evolution down the throats of the children of believers. Seriously, who cares if elementary and high school students get detailed exposure to evolutionary theories? There are plenty of other scientific subjects that get glossed over. And what practical difference does it make whether a 9th grader believes in evolution or not? The only 9th graders competent to judge the subject are those researching it on their own anyway. Fine, if the Christians don’t want evolution taught to their kids, or want to have it kept short and have a rebuttal to it included, why not let them have their way? After all, THEY ARE THE MAJORITY OF PARENTS, YOU ELITIST ATHEIST A-HOLES, AND IT’S THEIR KIDS! There’s no sacred necessity here. Lots of other science gets left out of school curricula.

The liberal passion for making sure that every kid is taught evolution is as intellectually suspect as the Christian rejection of the theory. The truth is that advocating evolution as if it were critical for basic education is a cover for wanting to chip away at the Christian faith of children.

Now, don’t get me wrong–destroying people’s faith in the Bible and in Jesus is doing the Lord’s work. But not when you do it coercively, not when you use the First Amendment and the fact that schools are mostly government-run as a happy pretext to brainwash other people’s kids. Because that’s what it is–let me make the point again: hardly any kid exposed to evolutionary theory understands it as presented, much less is competent to evaluate it.

If you think I’m wrong, think about this: Christine O’Donnell is being hounded and hooted at for not believing in evolution. It’s one of the main points being made to support the notion that she’s a complete idiot. Without doubt, the mainstream meme about evolution is that if you believe in the orthodox Christian account of creation, you’re a dolt. Every kid over the age of 10 has been exposed to this meme. If evolution-mongering isn’t just a convenient excuse to attack the religious, then why are the religious perennially attacked with it?

And while we’re talking about irrational beliefs that people emotionally cling to regardless of common sense and the evidence….

How about all the morons who thought that Cash for Clunkers was a good idea? Even if you now admit it wasn’t, if you thought it was at first, you have nothing but superstition and stupidity where your ability to reason about economics should be.

How many liberals, despite the fact that Obama’s stimulus hasn’t worked, and the falsification of all their predictions, just keep moving the goalposts: “it wasn’t enough,” “it just hasn’t worked yet,” “it did work, you just can’t tell how much worse it would have been without it.”

How many liberals believe that social security isn’t bankrupt (several running for office this year do, including that D-Douchebag Conway running for Congress in Tennessee)? How many believe that the government will really figure a way out of this without letting it collapse or cutting social security benefits? Most liberals won’t say it outright, but they act stupid and in denial.

Which is worse, to elect liberal cowards and economic morons who believe in economic ideas so stupid and discredited that they make “intelligent design” sound compelling by comparison? Or to elect people with economic horse sense about what’s happening today, even if they’re in denial about what happened 4 billion years ago?

Which is dumber, to be skeptical about a complex biological theory that is still evolving itself and is continually being revised, or to fail to grasp that you can’t spend more than you earn indefinitely?

I came to my faith later in life

So says Barack Obama.

He’s lying.

But let’s say he’s not.

It’s one thing to be immersed in religion as a child and to never escape the cradle.

I’ve never known anyone who grew up secular and who came to faith as an adult that wasn’t a hot mess.

It’s a litmus test for me.

Either Obama’s a hot mess or a liar.

Pick.

I’m going to say, Liar.

Jesus is not alright with me

I used to be a Christian. I was raised Christian.

Even when I was a Christian I didn’t much like Jesus. Of course, I didn’t know I didn’t like Jesus. It was only later that I realized I had learned nothing from Jesus that helped me make real world decisions.

Let’s start with the Beatitudes. Blessed are the…. what?

None of this makes any sense to anybody. People who think this is beautiful think anything they don’t understand is beautiful. Blessed are the poor in spirit for they shall whatever, blessed are the meek for they shall whatever, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be whatever. It’s incomprehensible crap. The only intelligible meaning you can take out of it is, Blessed are you if you suck, for you shall get revenge on all those who don’t suck. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. Why?

Moving on to the parables. The reason you’re not supposed to get them is that they’re deep and spiritual, and you’re not. They’re dumb stories, many of them with pernicious meanings, none of them smarter than Aesop’s fables.

And what about the stories about Jesus: Cursing fig trees, driving honest merchants out of the temple, never doing a day’s honest work in his life, reaming industrious Martha in favor of lazy Mary, getting everyone drunk in Cana, condemning everyone to hell who didn’t believe every word he said….where’s the thread that explains Jesus? His ethical philosophy was, If someone messes with you, let them. His political philosophy was, if the government messes with you, let them. Where does Jesus defend self-respect or human rights? Where does he celebrate productivity, creativity, self-determination? Jesus taught victims how to be better doormats and gave no aid or comfort to anyone trying to make a better life. If you’re not already pathetic, Christ can’t see you.

I think it was Bertrand Russell who said that everything Jesus said that was original wasn’t good and everything he said that was good wasn’t original. Whoever said it, it’s right.

Christ was a cretin.

A day of prayer

Everyone says, why are you atheists so hell-bent on preventing us from just praying for a day?

Honestly, as an atheist, I don’t know. I no more care about the government endorsing a day of prayer than I do a day of rooster worship.

My question, on this last day of prayer before the Supreme Court outlaws it, is, why do you prayer guys care so much?

Why does it matter to you so much that the government signs off on this?

I know why the atheists care–they’re pissed off at you for messing with their heads so much when they were growing up. They live for putting a stick in your spokes. I used to love sticking your spokes too, as a newly-minted atheist, but I got over it, and I know why a lot of people haven’t yet gotten over it.

But, seriously, why do you Christians treat this like a celebrity deathmatch?

You have a bazillion churches. You could get more attention and observance with a private kumbaya campaign. Why is it so important to make those of us who don’t care read “In God We Trust” every time we get pop tarts from a vending machine? Why do you need your ads everywhere in everyone’s faces? Including people that those ads just make more annoyed?

Is it that goddamn important to you that every goddamn knee shall goddamn kneel and every goddamn tongue shall goddamn bow?

I guess it is.

Writing this, I’m starting to regain my pissy atheism, and I’m starting to think about finding and sharpening a stick and looking for your spokes.

May 19th is “Screw James Taranto Day”

On May 20th, there will be a “Draw a picture of Mohammed” Day to push back against Islam. Not against Islamist extremists, but against Islam. Because it’s mainstream Islam, not just the “extremists,” that has a hissy fit and supports violence against any visual depiction of their pedophile prophet.  It’s also “mainstream” Muslims in America who go to mosque every week and contribute to Hamas  and Hezbollah and otherwise financially support terror.

James Taranto,  in the Wall Street Journal, recoils in … not horror, but in dhimmitude:

Why is “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” different? Because the taboo against depictions of Muhammad is not a part of America’s common culture. The taboos against flag burning, racial slurs and Holocaust denial are. The problem with the “in-your-face message” of “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” is not just that it is inconsiderate of the sensibilities of others, but that it defines those others–Muslims–as being outside of our culture, unworthy of the courtesy we readily accord to insiders. It is an unwise message to send, assuming that one does not wish to make an enemy of the entire Muslim world.

Muslims are outside our culture. Typical Muslims are more racist, sexist and homophobic than David Duke and those white supremacists up in Couer d’Alene, Idaho. If any lily white Protestant person said the things at work that Muslims profess every Friday, they’d get fired. Any Muslims this doesn’t apply to, don’t apply it to you. And stand up next Friday in church and tell everyone that you support Matt and Trey the South Park guys, and that anybody who enforces burkha or mistreating apostates or doesn’t defend Salman Rushdie’s right to speak should be ejected from Islam. Yeah, I didn’t think so.

I feel bad for good people who are Muslims. They’re trapped in a vile, violent culture that hides behind  American respect for barbaric beliefs that wear the fig leaf of religion.  Muslims belong to a religion that really will hurt them if they leave. In America, for every other religion than Islam, if you defect from your religion, you’ll be just fine–nobody is going to try to kill you for apostasy, although your former co-religionists may give you the cold shoulder. Move to a different city then. But if you’re Muslim, especially Muslim and female . . . Boy, I could make a good living taking out life insurance policies on girls who defect from Islam.

Hey, typical Muslims–let people who leave your nasty divine crime family live openly as ex-Muslim and criticize Islam without threat of violence–no, you must do more–you must speak up on Fridays and defend the right of people to leave Islam. You must not tolerate anyone in your mosques who is not tolerant of apostasy. Till you do that, well, silence is assent.

Now, believe it or not, I’m not at war against the entire Muslim world. I’m at war against the evil monsters who infest Islam who enforce Muslim orthodoxy with violence. Or by tacit for financial support for violence. I’m against the barbarism and nihilism and racism that is mainstream Islamic doctrine. Ok, I guess I am at war with pretty much the entire Muslim world then. Except for those who no longer want to be Muslim. I bet there’s a hell of a lot of them. But even in America, they won’t speak up.

There will almost certainly be no detente between Islam and the West–it’s a fantasy that the Muslim mainstream will ever support religious freedom, much less stop hating Jews and abusing women. But we can rescue millions who want to be airlifted out of the suffocating barbaric hell hole that is mainstream Islam if we stop sugar-coating it and start calling it out.

Why am I so much on Taranto’s ass about this one misstep when he’s right 98% of the time?  Because this really matters. Islam is today’s Nazism. Muslims aren’t holocaust deniers, they’re holocaust re-triers. Muslim countries are expansionist, vicious and have fantasies of taking over the world. The only thing they understand is being beaten by a “strong horse.”

When a liberal wuss advocates knuckling under to an enemy, it’s business as usual. But James, you’re not liberal wuss! Shame on you!

John 3:16

OBNOXIOUS DISCLAIMER:  If you’re happy with your Christian faith, I suggest you skip my posts on the subject of religion. What I have to say is not for you. It will just annoy you, and I won’t argue with you about it in any way that will be satisfying to you. Only if you are already looking for an exit strategy from your faith should you read what I have to say about it.

Here’s how arrogant I am about this: There is no such thing as an intellectually respectable Christian, at least when it comes to their Christianity.

Let me define Christian so I’m sure to offend exactly whom I intend: A Christian is a person who believes that Christ’s Atonement (crucifixion) was real and necessary to avert universal damnation for the human race.

I make no allowance for the possibility of engaging a Christian in intellectually rewarding discussion about the central truth-claims of Christianity. I’d rather debate a 9-11 Truther.

If you believe in the Atonement, you may be perfectly smart, moral, nice, loveable and respectable in other areas of your life. But you’re a crackpot goofball about this.

As for discussions of morality, ethics and politics, I’m happy to talk about all of it, as long as you don’t pull a “God said it, I believe it and that settles it.”

Now, on to John 3:16:

At every pro football game, you see the camera pan to John 3:16 painted on the belly of some fat fan with enough belly to support painting the numerals large enough to be seen from the Goodyear blimp. This New Testament Bible verse reads (KJV):

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

This short sentence packs up all the things most fundamentally wrong with Christian belief, so it’s worth unpacking it. Implicit in it are these propositions:

• The default fate meted out by God to every human is to perish (go to hell, experience eternal damnation — to end up in some very bad state that everyone would want to avoid — I’m going to call it going to hell).
• Contradictorily, God loves all us people he is sending to hell. Why then would he send us to hell? Because we deserve it for not being morally perfect.
• God has provided a Get-out-of-hell-free card: You must believe in Jesus as your personal savior. There is controversy in the Christian world about whether mere belief will avert God’s wrath. Belief is definitely the sine qua non for salvation, but there may be other requirement and indications of sincerity, such as living a reasonably moral life.

To those raised in Christian churches, the above points seem obvious and unremarkable. They’ve been breathing it in since they were toddlers and don’t smell anything off anymore.  To those not raised Christian, it seems bizarre and convoluted and more than they want to take on thinking or arguing about.

My first close experience with someone not raised Christian was with my daughter. I abandoned Christianity before she was 2 years old. She was raised in a religion-free bubble. You should have heard the hilarious middle school conversation that occurred when I tried to explain the Eucharist…”Dad, shut up! Normal people don’t pretend to be cannibals in church!”

So now let us reason together about what’s wrong with John 3:16. If you’ve been raised Christian, it’s going to take some effort to look at this with fresh eyes. You’ve heard this so many times that, like any phrase repeated over and over again, it loses semantic content and just becomes sound.

The first thing wrong is the binary view of justice implicit in Christianity: If you are not morally perfect, you deserve eternal punishment, no different from that deserved by Jeff Dahmer or Ted Bundy. Absent from Christianity is the sensible notion that the punishment should fit the crime. Instead, it’s “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God” and all deserve eternal damnation. Doesn’t matter whether the worst thing you ever did in your whole life is stand up your prom date, or if you raped her and killed her and then took her home. God cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance. Every misdemeanor deserves the same punishment as capital felonies.

The second thing wrong is the notion that punishment should obviously be eternal. Really? Unending torture, eon after eon? How does this protect the innocent or reform the guilty? Inflicting eternal pain for the sake of making what point? Even for Jeff Dahmer or Hitler this seems over the top and…considerably more evil than what Jeff or Adolf did.

The best depiction I’ve seen yet of the morals of the Christian God is in the Hellraiser movies. Eternal sadism for its own sake. How morally numbed have Christians become that they don’t recoil from Jehovah like they recoil from Pinhead?

The third thing wrong is the idea that only believing will save you. Nothing else matters if you don’t believe. Let’s get clear here about what “believing in Jesus” really means. It means submitting to Jesus under death threat. Not just accepting that Jesus exists. Whatever Jesus says goes. Not my will, but thine, O Lord. The demand is that you give up independent moral reasoning and self-determination to a being you don’t have sufficient logical reason to believe even exists, on pain of eternal hellfire. (This last is what Christians call “having faith.”)

In what important way is knuckling under to Jesus different from

“He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

If Big Brother takes the rats away from Winston’s face, and the Christian God takes away the threat of eternal damnation, what’s left?

But, wait, the Christian god isn’t like Big Brother. God commands us to do what’s right. A few Biblical counterexamples:

•  God told Abraham to murder his son Isaac, purely as a test of Abraham’s obedience. Yes, at the last moment, Jehovah relented. So what? Doesn’t that prove that God knew murdering your kid is wrong? Here’s a case where fresh eyes help: What if you saw a woman on Oprah telling a story about how her boyfriend told her to kill her child to prove her love. And she was just about to do it too, when he let her off the hook. You’d consider her contemptible and him a monster.
• Jehovah commanded Moses to commit genocide against nearly all the inhabitants of Canaan. And this time, Jehovah didn’t say “April fool’s!” Why was this genocide ordered? Because Jehovah was worried that the Israelites might, over time, be influenced by unbelievers and fall away from the faith. To put this in similar fresh eyes terms as above: What if you heard about a Protestant parent who killed all the Catholic kids in the neighborhood so there’d be no chance of his kid growing up to be a bead-jiggler?
• Jehovah allowed slavery and even accepted actual human sacrifice of slaves, not just of animals (read the last chapter of the book of Leviticus, closely). The central event in Christianity is exactly the murder of an innocent to appease God’s rage. Fresh eyes, people: how can you be revolted by the Aztecs sacrificing virgins and not see that the Christian god’s bloody demands are the same?

Homework:

• Why would God care whether you believe in him or not? What difference would it make to God what you think? If it matters so much to God that he’ll burn you in hell forever just for not acknowledging him, what does that tell you about God?
• Why does God demand your belief by appealing to your fear of damnation? Is that all he’s got? Why doesn’t he make better arguments?
• What other arguments than believe in me or burn in hell  has the Christian God offered to get you to believe in him? (I mean arguments in scripture, not arguments from human apologists trying to defend the Christian God against reasonable questions.) (Hint for mainstream Christians: there’s a thing called a concordance which is like an index to the Bible.) Before taking up all the craven apologists who’ve tried to make up for and explain away contradictions and absurdities in the Bible, let’s get a good grasp on what’s actually in there.
• What offense would make you sentence one of your children to eternal torment? Can you imagine the eternal hatred you would have to feel to not relent on that sentence.
• Punishment is usually justified on grounds of (1) deterring others from committing the same crime (2) protecting others against the criminal, and (3) rehabilitation, or deterring the criminal from committing the same crime again. What other justification for punishing someone can you think of? How does the threat of eternal hell for unbelief serve any of the purposes I listed or that you added?
• How well do you think the threat of hell works as a deterrent? Which important moral offenses or crimes do you think are most deterred by the threat of hell? If you didn’t think you were going to go to hell for it, maybe just to Purgatory, which moral offenses or crimes would you commit? (I hope you said fornication, like a normal person.)
• What is it that keeps most atheists and even Christians who don’t believe in hell from being habitual criminals?  Make a list of all the moral rules you think are important. Which ones do you obey mostly to keep from going to hell? which ones would you discard if there were no hell?
• Make a list of the moral offenses you think that unbelievers are more likely than believers to commit. Why are they more likely to commit these offenses? Are you sure they’re really offenses?
• Do you think that not believing in Jesus is in itself is a moral offense? If so, why? If not, why should not believing be sufficient reason to send anyone to hell forever? Does belief in Jesus excuse other moral offenses? Of course it does–that’s the whole point. So, what moral offenses, unrepented of, should be minor enough to not get you sent to hell?  Should people who don’t believe in Jesus, but commit the same offense, go to hell while you don’t?  What moral or characterological virtue is conferred by merely by believing in Jesus?
• Let’s say you go to hell. Should you be able to do anything, ever, to get out of hell? Would believing in Jesus now be enough? (After all, you now would have plenty of evidence to believe and submit–you’d have to be crazy not to). Why shouldn’t believing after you’ve been sent to hell be enough to get you out of hell, if believing before you went to hell is good enough? Is it because believing per se still isn’t enough? You didn’t believe IN TIME and BY FAITH, so now it doesn’t count. How is Jehovah/Jesus different from a salesman who tells you that the deal is good TODAY ONLY? Why should your eternity be predicated on TODAY ONLY? If the important thing is that you believe, and you eventually believe, shouldn’t that be enough? or is the important thing that you believe NOW? Why is NOW and without intellectual foundation so important to Jehovah and used car salesmen?
• If you were God, what would you sentence these guys to?  Hitler. Tiger Woods. Torquemada. Ted Bundy. Jimmy Carter. Timothy McVeigh. Larry David. Christopher Hitchens. Sean Hannity. Stalin. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Christina Aguilera. Britney Spears. Khalil Gibran. The Christian God would probably give eternal hell to Hitler, Tiger, Larry David, Chris Hitchens for sure, Stalin, Emerson, Spears and Gibran. In heaven would be  Torqie, Teddy, Jimmy, Timmy, Sean and Christina. Seems about right. Doesn’t it?
• God sent His Son to save us. Jesus, by all accounts, lived a perfect life with not one moral blemish and was sent to Earth to be brutally tortured and murdered over the course of several days which made it possible for his father to not savagely torture all of humanity for eternity. What the fuck? I mean, what the fucking fuck?
• Last questions for today: what’s the difference between living in a Mel Gibson or a Clive Barker universe? Which would you rather watch again, The Passion of the Christ or Hellraiser? Which one has better moral lessons to teach? Why should you settle for either?

UPDATED 4/3/2010 – re-organized and removed irrelevant material…for a later, expanded post.

Liberals, Finis, part ii (I’d Sell My Soul for Total Control)

Most American conservatives want to live their own lives and spend their resources mostly on themselves and on people who give them something back in return. Even if what they’re getting back in return is just one more day of not paying alimony.

Conservative compassion is something like a magnetic field:  it weakens exponentially with emotional distance. Not so for liberals. Liberals are passionate about helping people they’ve never met, never will and would never want to.

Both liberals and conservatives believe in Promiscuous Compassion (PC). Why do liberals take this ideal more seriously? Or, at least, why do liberals try harder to ensure its universal application?

Because conservative PC is circumscribed by the institutions that conservatives think are appropriate for expressing compassion. Conservatives think church, family and community are the legitimate venues for practicing altruism. (In that last sentence, community refers to Rotary Club and JayCees, not local government.)

Liberals see no reason why government shouldn’t be the front line in the PC army. In America, family and church are too local, fractured and ungovernable to satisfy the liberal desire to solve problems once and for all.

Liberals think of government as the perfect hammer to pound down every nail. They lust to hold the hammer and wield it wisely.

Conservatives grant government grudging tolerance and limited allegiance. They are deeply suspicious of whoever is swinging the hammer and are always watching to see if they’re going to need to swarm the bastard.

Conservative PC is deeply personal and local, even in support of a mission half way around the world. There are many little platoons, as Charles Murray puts it, each with skin in the game and deep local knowledge of the facts on the ground.

Liberal projects, casting their nets too widely, are hammer handed. Liberals promise that nobody will slip through the cracks of their system, without realizing that the rest of us consider that a threat rather than a promise. Liberals respect no bounds when it comes to using whatever power they can leverage in teaching the whole world to sing in perfect totalitarianism.

Liberalism (Americant-style) is totalitarian.

Let’s get clear here about what totalitarianism is: It is the notion that an external authority should be allowed, for whatever reason, to control all aspects of individual choice, including the most intimate and personal aspects. Forcing a racist to hire or rent to black people is totalitarian. Denying gays the right and honor to serve in the military is totalitarian. Forcing people to separate their trash in different colored bins is totalitarian.

Sure, it’s small “t” totalitarianism. It’s the condo association board and being snooty to black people and being mean to gays in uniform, not Stalin-totalitarianism. But it’s the same nasty root impulse and the people on the condo board are easy pickings and henchmen for a Stalin. Excusing them is like excusing the little brat down the street who always smells like pee and smoke and has cat blood on his t-shirt, and then wondering where serial killers come from.

Yes, American Christians are, philosophically, and I use that word loosely when applying it to Christianity, technically totalitarians. But, more deeply than ideologically, most Christians have become cultural Americans. Were push to come to shove, the majority of Christians would abandon The Bible before giving up The Bill of Rights. They see no conflict between the two, and good luck trying to convince them there is one. God knows, I’ve tried and I’m glad I failed.

I’m fine with accepting a split decision in the battle between Jehovah and Jefferson. Christians are more than welcome to think their doG won that fight. In any case, Jesus & Thomas have shaken hands and are tag-teaming the terrorists, and that’s good enough for me.

Ok, so where were we? Oh, yeah–What do we owe the poor?

Nothing.

to be continued in pt iii

Old Yeller

UPDATE March 2019: I stand by every word of this and more.

In my last rant, I noted that Islam was the Old Yeller of religions. That evocative metaphor evidently needs more comment:

• If you’re too young to know who Old Yeller was, then you’re old enough to use Google. If you can’t use Google effectively, then you’re a complete idiot who shouldn’t be reading this blog in the first place. You  should be able to look up cultural references like I used to look up words in the dictionary when I was 14 and someone said something I didn’t get. I shouldn’t have to pre-digest for you like I’m a momma bird and you’re my retarded baby who will never fly.
• Old Yeller was put down for being rabid. Am I suggesting that Islam should be put down for being rabid? That would be the kind thing to do. This religion cannot be tamed or reasoned with. It’s in the shed barking and foaming. We’re too pussified to just shoot it, so we’ll let it suffer and thrash and knock stuff off the shelves till it expires on its own. In that thrashing, it may knock Israel off the shelf, and an American city or two, but in the end, Islam will die. And we’ll be traumatized and sad and we’ll wish we’d taken care of this earlier.  So, yeah, I stand by the Old Yeller metaphor.
• Yes, Islam is mental rabies. Honor killings, Fort Hood, the Susan Koman thing…remind me of the last time anyone Islamic did anything important except for exploding and killing teenage girls. Islam contributes nothing, except money to terrorists. Every decent Muslim (that’s not quite oxymoronic) is ashamed and terrified of saying anything because Islam is so violent. Islam isn’t so much a religion as it is an organized crime family.
• All Muslims are racists. And sexists. If you wouldn’t do business with an acknowledged Christian racist/sexist, you should equally shun Muslims.

Long before 9-11, long before the Internet, I was getting kicked off message boards for challenging Muslim intolerance, racism and sexism. I’ve despised good Muslims since the ’80’s. Bad Muslims are great, like bad Catholic girls.

In every mosque in America, Muslim imams are covertly or overtly preaching intolerance, sexism and hate. None of them are preaching tolerance, feminism or ecumenicism.  There’s no such thing as moderate Islam.

Well, that’s not quite right. Islam is different and we have a hard time wrapping our minds around their world view. Islam didn’t get the Westphalia memo and it doesn’t map to how we think institutions should work. The dynamics of Islam are like the dynamics of the Mafia. The Democrats are right about how terrorism is a criminal problem. They’re wrong that it’s isolated, not organized.  We should treat all of Islam as a criminal problem–like the Mafia.

UPDATE: Ok, that was a little harsh saying that all Muslims are racist sexists or sexist racists. Of course, they’re not. Did you know Muslim men shave their pubic hair? They’re bald like little girls down there. They cut the clitorises off their women too. I digress.

What I should have said is that all Muslims are like people living in neighborhoods run by the Mafia. Some of them are into the crime, most of them are just trying to get along. But nearly all of them are corrupted, subservient, easily co-opted.

Time for Thorns said it beautifully today:

Islam is an infantilizing religion, reducing physical adults to permanent  children. emotionally and psychologically.   The individual is never responsible for the success or failure of anything but following his imam’s instructions, and that creates the mindset that someone else is responsible for adherents’ personal shortcomings.

Perhaps in the poorest sections of the Muslim world, you say.  But find yourself a retired military helicopter instructor and ask if any of his students have been Muslim.  You will hear of intelligent, Western-educated, seemingly modern men who, in a critical flight moment took their hands off the chopper controls and called for Allah to save them instead of using their training to fight for control of the situation.  That response is common in Muslim trainees, but rare in others.

Still, there’s that stupid Christian idiot Carrie Underwood and her Jesus Take the Wheel song. Seriously, that song makes me want to revoke womens’ right to vote. How about Jesus Teach Me How to Drive My Own Car?

Islam isn’t unique, it just a primitive social arrangement that has got Jed Clampett lucky. Otherwise it would be dead already.

So let’s get real: not all Muslims are racist sexist terrorists. Like all religious congregations, most Muslims don’t have the courage of their convictions. But most Muslims are racist, sexist, terrorist sympathizers.

I was raised Mormon. I know what it’s like to be in an apocalyptic separated cult that wants to smile and fit in until it can take over. Islam has no room for you unless you submit. Unlike Mormons, Muslims are dangerous. Mormons blink. Muslims bomb.

No, many Muslims don’t actively hate Jews, despise women and think the rest of us deserve killing. But they grovel in front of those who do.

A woman wearing a burkha in public should be treated like a woman wearing a dog-chain in public. No, I’m wrong about that. A woman who lets herself be led around by a dog-chain in public  in America is saying Fuck You! to everyone but her master, and she’s saying things to him the rest of us don’t want to hear. It’s self-expression.

The woman in the burkha is suffocating and submitting. It’s truly offensive, not performance art, not bratty self-flaunting. It’s slavery. I don’t give a flying monkey if the girl in the burkha says, I’m fine. That’s what the little girl in Utah who was kidnaped said too.  Caring what the girl says is like caring what the Roman Polanski victim says. It’s about how if you can beat her down that much then you’re excused.

If you mess her up enough that she forgives and submits, then the rest of us should fight that much harder.

Anyhow, Islam isn’t so much a religion as it is an organized crime family and it isn’t so much an organized crime family as it is a rape cult.

G.I. Jihadi

Nidal Malik Hasan killed a dozen solders (I won’t say fellow solders) at Ft. Hood this week, and he wounded several dozen more. The US government and the legacy media are focusing on this as an act of random mental instability.  Move along, everyone, no terrorism to see here….

NPR (NPR!) has reported that Hasan, a psychiatrist, once incongruously and unexpectedly pounced and delivered a Grand Rounds lecture on Islam in which he talked about the bloody ends to which infidels should rightfully come. He did not–ahem–unambiguously distance himself from supporting beheadings and pouring burning oil down infidel throats. Evidently, people in the audience were–ahem–wondering whether they should say something.

Yesterday, at work, coincidentally, I talked to a guy who got called to stand and deliver in front of HR for saying, “Ok, guys, let’s get going.” Some crazy bitch objected to being lumped in with the guys. That’s Nancy Pelosi’s and Barbara Boxer’s America. One in which offense is taken where obviously none is intended and intelligent adults (medical professionals) sit meekly while a Muslim terrorist rants about his religious lust to kill them.

UPDATE MARCH 2019: Since then, I was fired in January 2017 from that same corporation for much more egregious offenses that nonetheless still shouldn’t be considered offenses.  Ironically and awesomely, my last day was Donald Trump’s first day in office.

Most of the media have displayed this same attitude. And why shouldn’t they? They’ve also been conditioned and cowed in diversity and sensitivity trainings required of all Americans who want to work for any large corporation or organization.

The focus has been put on Hasan’s mental instability, with the “narrative” (Jesus, I hate the way that term is used–we’ve all been polluted by post-modernism) being that Hasan is a nut and he just happened to spin the How Would You Like to Express Your Nuttiness? Wheel, and it landed on Islam. Hell, he could have been a Scientologist or Truther or a Bircher or, most likely, a right-wing Christian. (Most people in the legacy media believe that Christians have multiple listings on the Nuttiness Wheel, while Islam’s pie slice is narrower than most.)

So, your typical suicide bomber isn’t mentally twisted, but is the very model of a modern Major-General? I guess so, after yesterday.

Leave it to me to take a twisted lesson from the massacre, but the lesson I’m taking is that we’ve been way too lenient with these politically correct diversity crap-mongers. They’ve  infected us with a sickening moral meekness that excuses any atrocity committed in the name of a protected characteristic. Every sensitivity/diversity training session is nothing more and nothing less than demanding that you make no judgments beyond “How cute and National Geographic!” about protected characteristics.

Perhaps this was not all that pernicious when it applied only to biological characteristics like race and gender and age. (I say not all that pernicious, because I don’t think it’s entirely innocent. Interfering with the moral decisions of stupid people is wrong. You should be able to live in society “at will” with other people–rejecting them, refusing to do business with them, even insulting them, for no damn good reason, without serious external consequences for such behavior. I support diversity so much that I’m fine with tolerating racists, sexists and hot 19 year old age-ist girls who don’t want to date 50 year old me).

What happened, slippery slope snickety quick, is that the Sensitivistas* hopped from biology to ideology, demanding that nobody think critically about religion or ethnicity (really, ethnicity means culture). They demand that we not examine ideas if people classify those ideas as off limits because they are religious or cultural. At the end of a stultifying day in a diversity/sensitivity class, there’s no moral distinction between discriminating against someone because she has a clitoris and judging people who want to cut it off.

Or discriminating against a deranged Muslim who doesn’t much like infidels bossing him around. I’ll make it clear: had the military cashiered him, he still would have done something like this. Maybe he would have done it in a concealed carry state and the body count would have been lower. Or he’d have done it on Saturday in a New York mall and the body count would have been huge. There are no good choices when dealing with someone like this.

I’ll close with this, and defend it later:

Islam is the Old Yeller of religions.

* Living in the Great Northwest, I usually call them “Sasquatch Lesbians.” I’ve never been to one of those enervating diversity/sensitivity classes that wasn’t being run by a Sasquatch Lesbian. What’s wrong with us that we let them become the Alpha Males?