Westboro Baptist invades South Florida

December 14th, 2009 • 1 comment christianity, intolerance
Tags: hatred

The infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas, known nationwide for its religion of hate and extreme intolerance, has sent some of its acolytes to Palm Beach County to protest. What are they protesting against? Well, besides hating homosexuals which is their usual M.O., they’ve brought out copious signage to incite hate against our huge Jewish population down here. Outside of New York and Israel, south Florida has the highest population of Jews in the world, so what better place to hate them than in their own backyards? Besides being here to spread hate, I have absolutely what other reason they’d be here for but they’ve got a new gag they’ve brought with them: trampling the American flag. As many of us know, defacing the American flag was a pretty big deal back in the Vietnam era, I personally have no experience with it but it was fairly heinous from what I’m told. In Florida, it is a public crime to desecrate the flag. So, one Hezekiah Phelps was interviewed on the CBS12 news while he was walking all over the flag, openly participating in the crime. The irony in this is the fact that he’s protesting against Jews with an obvious Jewish name. I guess shacking up with ol’ Fred Phelps removes the idea of irony from your memory.

I found it interesting that the Sun Sentinel was not able to interview any of these hate peddlers but CBS12 simply sent a camera crew up to West Palm Beach today and not only interviewed two of them but was able to video all of the protesters — all 6 of them. Seems the Sentinel didn’t think hate against two large portions of their readership would be important to cover.

The Westboro crazies are going to be at Spanish River High School tomorrow in Boca. I’m not sure what time they’re going to be there but I am going to attempt to get down there for some pictures of the insanity in action.

So what’s this I hear about the Templars wanting to sue the Vatican?

August 4th, 2008 • christianity, idiocy
Tags: christianity, legal

While thumbing through my shared RSS feeds in Google Reader, I came across this little gem: Knights Templar demanding “good name” and assets back from Vatican after 700 years. I’m not joking, this is a real article. Now, the fact that it’s from The Register makes it suspicious enough as they’re not only an IT site, they’re a bunch of wily prankster, treating everyday like April Fool’s Day.

I have a feeling this is another parody article but if it’s not, more power to the Templars! Not so much for sticking it to the Pope but for having the balls to go to court over 700 year old assets that may or may not have actually existed. I’m sure, locked somewhere in a dusty “Eyes only” vault, the Vatican does have some records of what assets they seized from the Order seven centuries ago but good luck getting it out of them. Suing for 100 billion Euros? Which one of them is doing the Dr. Evil pinky-to-mouth expression? There’s a part of me that wants this so very much to be real. A (now vaguely) religious and righteous fraternal Order suing the pants off the (now vaguely) relevant keepers of the coffers.

There’s just so many Monty Python jokes that can, and will, come of this.

Via Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins’ shared news items

Conflated Catholic Confraternity points finger at PZ

July 30th, 2008 • christianity, idiocy
Tags: crackergate

I’ve been mulling over this trite screed all day. I actually held off on posting earlier because I wanted to see what PZ would write. And rip it apart he did. This contrite piece of garbage is full of logical fallacies but they’re well worded, at least.

They’re up in arms trying to get PZ fired for something he did in his down time at home so it’s wholly — well, in this case, physically holey — unrelated to school. Can we all mail bomb write to your contrite brotherhood of buggerers and get you fired for being a gas bag? No and you’re not going to succeed in getting PZ usurped from his post at UM Morris either. The overall buffoonery from this whole ordeal is simply laughable and the lengths at which Bill Donahue and now these deacons and pastors are willing to go just to protect some crackers is amazing. Only if they would put their misplaced time towards something useful, like bringing the troops home or fighting climate change, they might lead happy lives like the rest of us secularists do. They drag out the Bill of Rights and how it offers them religious protection but only when it applies to those non-practitioners who choose to malign it, a point PZ also makes and drives home hard. They do not understand that freedom of speech also protects us non-believers and we’re free to verbally, and written, abuse your religion all we want to. I don’t use this blog as a soapbox against fairy tales any more but I sure as hell do out in public.

Lies and hate speech which incite contempt or violence are not protected under the law. Hence, inscribing Swastikas on Jewish synagogues or publicly burning copies of the Christian Bible or the Muslim Koran, especially by a faculty member of a public university, are just as heinous and just as unconstitutional.

Being wholly ignorant of the law — just how they like it — they trot out the fact that this is a hate-inducing act of slamming a nail through a wafer. You’re right, it certainly was. PZ received a large number of death threats and gigs of hatemail (probably many gigabytes of it). Is this not heinous as well? Or is it OK that fellow God-fearing Catholics were threatening a man with death — and a castration or two — and asking him to desecrate the Qu’ran? Not only is that a faceplam-inducing piece of flaming crap, it’s contradictory. You can defame non-theists all you want but you think there’s some non-existent law that protects you from us doing the same? We’re not lawyers but we’re smarter than you apparently and we know that both sides can start flame wars until the end of time, the non-theist side will just laugh the whole time.

One fails to see the relevance of the desecration of a Catholic sacrament to the science of Biology.

One does fail to see a link that does not exist, no matter how hard you want it to. PZ teaches biology at school, he does whatever he wants to do at home. Just as you do.

A biologist has no business ‘dissing’ any religion, rather, they should be busy teaching the scientific discipline they were hired to teach.

He does and he does it at school. He could be out building a yurt behind his house after work for what it matters but that doesn’t concern this Catholic gathering of buggering windbags. Yurts have nothing to do with biology either but then again, he doesn’t teach yurt building in his genetics classes. The next line of the press release is a real clincher as it says “tolerating” this kind of behavior is “repugnant”. Really? Since when does a secular institution have to not tolerate someone not teaching fairy tales in a science classroom?

This whole ordeal shows how out of touch with reality Bill Donahue and the Catholic Confraternity are.

Falwell’s wife writes book, wants him alive again

June 10th, 2008 • christianity, intolerance

Jerry Falwell died one year ago last month and his wife has just put out a new book, surely to be a snoozer. I was just reading this link from Newsweek regarding her new book and how she thinks the world needs Jerry back. Now, I’ve heard of apologists but this thing reads like a religious right significant other apologetic diatribe.

I understand it’s hard to lose a love one, despite whether people like them or not, it’s hard to deal with. Falwell was a media mogul for religious pundits that have gone over the edge. But really, this interview reads like a half-assed “I’m sorry but not really” letter, I especially love this quote from it:

After 9/11 he blamed the attacks on paganists, abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians. This has not helped his legacy. Did he mean what he said?
I think it was such a horrible time … I think the whole nation was in shock. In hindsight Jerry would rather have said things a bit differently. But then again, everyone makes mistakes.

Of course he’d say something different because you realize that 9/11 had absolutely nothing to do with feminists (without them you wouldn’t be able to vote), abortionists (because all those unbirthed fetuses made some fanatics hijack planes) and gays and lesbians (I’m sure they had much better things to do than influence fanatics who hate them anyway). No need to apologize for Jerry’s incendiary remarks, it’s been almost 7 years, no one cares any more but he wouldn’t say anything differently and you know it. This one’s good too:

Do you think the “religious right” will be an important factor in November’s election?
I’m not too well bred on this kind of stuff. Jerry didn’t really bring problems home, so I don’t really know a lot about it.

So the movement that Jerry essentially spearheaded and brought to fruition was a problem? The movement that actually made him important was a problem? There’s a shocker. Most of us already knew this stuff but I’m pretty sure you guys talk about this in church and it’s a big deal otherwise, why would a former presidential candidate be so enthralled to write a passage for the book? Here’s a nice quote to directly go against what she just said:

Have you thought about who you’ll vote for in November?
I’ll vote for McCain, for sure.

Not because he’s A. part of the right and B. religion, correct? He’s just an upstanding swell citizen, that’s it!

I know we all read a bunch of contradictory stuff from these bobbleheads but this one just made me laugh from the belly. I wonder who coached her on what to say but didn’t coach her on what to make sense on.

Purity balls are for the overprotective

May 1st, 2008 • 1 comment christianity

I saw another video about these last year and it blew my mind how bizarre these people are. Purity balls are fancy balls where fathers and daughters go to dance, hang out, share their views, and basically get all buddy buddy with each other. This is apparently something they cannot do at home for whatever reason. You can read the previous linked post about my thoughts on this stupid outmoded ritual. But I want to talk about this video.

The father in the video has 6 kids, 5 of them are girls. He likes to go on “dates” with his daughters (no, not those types of dates…yet) so they can bond. Again, this must be something they cannot do singularly or in a group at home. With 5 daughters, this may actually be somewhat true. But let’s look at the video again. This family is comprised of a mother and father who are “fundamentalist Christians” — their words, not mine — because they’re born again. The mother thinks it’s “completely natural” for her husband to go on dates with their daughters, again their words not mine. I think this is admirable since in such a large family, I can only imagine that getting good bonding time with 6 different kids is overly tough. But that’s really where I stop thinking they’re being admirable and being downright stupid and overprotective.

The ball is thrown so fathers and daughters can make promises to be pure, meaning abstinence until marriage. Whoops! The father’s already broken that vow by the fact that he’s got a daughter. I point this out because their wording is backwards and logically impossible as it is but I’m nit-picking. The mother in this video thinks if her daughters have premarital sex, they’ll suffer some unholy and irreconcilable psychological trauma and will end up probably ruining their future marriages over it. While that may be true, the same is more than possible (read: extremely likely) now that their daughters are being essentially sequestered away to date their father. The featured daughter of the story, whose name I couldn’t get because I can barely hear the audio on my laptop, looks at her girlfriends who have boyfriends and gets envious because she’s not experiencing the same thing. Now she’s guilty of harbouring two “deadly sins” of being both envious and lustful (which is not always sexual in nature), that’s not very Christian. This story just fell flat on its face because this girl is yearning to be in a normal relationship for her age.

The father has little idea of what kind of mental trauma he’s putting on this girl by taking her on dates, complete with limos and fancy dinners, but the mother seems fully aware. She seems to think this is preparing her for a joy-filled life with a future husband who is a carbon copy of her father. This guy may be sweet and nice and will probably end up sexually stifled, from attending the same purity balls, so that should turn out pretty well. It’s a gross generalization, I know, but the daughter is going to look for someone who embodies the same principles her parents indoctrinated her with. She’ll probably not see past that until it’s too late. Until she is suffering from psychological trauma at the hands of her husband who turns out to be crazy.

Now, these kids are also home-schooled. This in and of itself is not a bad idea but the daughter has a great justification for it: she won’t be exposed to the same whims that make “other people unpure.” That’s entirely true because at home, she’s not interacting with her peers in a true-to-life environment. She’s stuck in an overprotective bubble for a few hours a day, huddled away from normal things that normal kids do.

One of the best parts of this video is when some woman, a teacher I presume as she’s not introduced at all, lauds President Bush for his push for abstinence education. “Abstinence works every time!” she claims he said. Sure it does. It works every time. Every time until a kid gets an STD or hurts themselves because they weren’t taught about sex properly. If you abstain, you’ll never get any STDs or have any kinds of problems right? Because you abstained, right? Wrong. There’s scads of freely available data showing that abstinence education just leads to ignorance and ultimately, sexual issues with undereducated teens. Funny enough, there are more kids in schools that teach “abstinence only” curriculum that are getting pregnant than there are in schools where they teach sex ed (1, 2, 3, 4). There’s also more data showing these kids are at a much higher risk of contracting an STD because they’re simply clueless.

The best part of the video? It’s three quotes a little over 5 minutes in to about 6 minutes in.

I do believe it’s important to have that father figure, especially for a female. Um, I think women were created to feel accepted by men. (emphasis mine)

That’s by the mother of this family. And I’m not paraphrasing or taking this out of context, it’s what she said, verbosely. Women are on this planet to feel accept by and to appease men. Straight from a woman’s mouth.

I can offer myself as a priceless gift.

A female emcee, having the girls read off their purity vows. Yep, now women are gifts to men. So, not only are females created to feel accepted by men but they’re also gifts to men! Hell yes, this is might be a movement I can get behind!

God created men and women separate even though in the world today we want to think they’re the same. We are all different, thankfully. A woman needs to feel loved and accepted by her father, uh, she was created by God to feel that. (emphasis mine)

That’s from the father in the video. Now we have a fundamentalist Christian acknowledgment that women were created solely to feel loved by their fathers and other men. Apparently, God is very sexist and likes to play the emotional deviant.

The daughter of the video, whose name is Angela by the way (finally heard it clearly at the end), renounces kissing and “things like that” as bad and hopes she never does them. That’s verbose. So she can kiss her father and it’s okay but kissing a boy she might be interested in? Out of the question!

Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

[Via Fundie Watch]

Just another reason I will never move to Texas

August 8th, 2007 • 2 comments christianity, idiocy

Here’s a link to a mathematics course description from a Christian high school in San Antonio.

I don’t know about you but someone got a bit too carried away with the copy/paste love in all of these “descriptions” which, aside from half of “Geometry”, are almost exact replicas of each other. Why bother even having math and teac forcing students through these classes when God invented math and all of its consistencies. I guess he was too busy with mathematics to bother correcting all the inconsistencies the scribes of the Bible since it’s probably not that important in any life-affirming or life guiding aspects.

How can we be sure that God got Pythagoras’ theorem correct? I mean, God created all mathematics known to man so why did he let a known blasphemous heathen steal a heavenly theorem and plaster his sacrilegious name all over God’s hard work?

Freudian slip?

July 12th, 2007 • christianity, spam

I was just sitting here, investigating a Spamcop report and I go to look up the domain:

root@viper [~]# grep websofffaith /etc/userdomains

And it’s actually websoffaith.com, whoops? Even funnier, they’re spamming people to drum up business. I’d post their number publicly but I’d probably get into a bit of trouble for that.

West Palm Beach woman sets to ban books she’s never read

July 11th, 2007 • 1 comment christianity, education, intolerance

Sean Prophet writes about a local woman getting the WPB school board to ban books that she’s never read based on her own personal beliefs. That’s right, beliefs. She’s on public record as having never read any of the books cover-to-cover but I’m going to guess it’s more than that, she’s probably never read any of them at all. She pretty much proves this when she met with the school board’s superintendent about it and couldn’t recite blasphemous passages or page numbers even though she’s required to provide sufficient proof to back up the complaint.

She wants 80 books on topics such as homosexuality, atheism, abortions, and even a book about Richard the Lionheart pulled from the shelves. Yep, she wants a book based on the trials of a noble and respected king, who also happened to be deeply pious, to be banned because she’s not even read the thing. I can imagine that right now, this woman is the laughing stock of her subdivision because she’s clearly displayed her own ineptitude and lack of sense in a very public way. Funny how I bet she skipped over all the books on demonology or the shady past of the Vatican because they have some religious roots. Next week will she want newspapers running recent stories of pastors charged with sodomizing and molesting children pulled from local newsstands because it casts a negative light on her fellow Christians in their time of backsliding. Or what about pastors that fraud and steal from generous contributors?

Not one to aid in his mother’s misguided plight is her atheist son whom she conjectures that he think she’s “pretty stupid.” I’m guessing he isn’t the only one based on this aberrant display of public foolishness. I don’t go to libraries and complain that they have Bibles, Korans, or Torahs on the shelves and demand they be pulled because I’m not the arbiter and controller of knowledge and feel that people are free to read whatever they want. Maybe that’s something she’ll learn too. But somehow, you know, I really doubt that. She’ll probably try and take this to the local court.

Who were the Kenites?

May 22nd, 2007 • 26 comments christianity, confusion

Just who are the Kenites? Getting a concise answer is actually very difficult. I was proposed this question during a discussion between a Christian and myself. Amazingly, the Bible offers little to no help at all and this is one of the few pieces of literature they’re ever mentioned by name. Being a non-theist I wanted to know a little bit about their origin in history and if they were ever a significant force in the world. Well, to answer the latter question up front, not really. I also wanted to find out why this particular person thought they were the spawn of my dear Satan.

So I started out on finding out about who the Kenites might be and where they’re from. The Kenites were a small tribe of Palestine but where they came from before that is practically unknown so I will stick with this viewpoint. They were a tribe of southern Judah and Palestine that were assimilated, by the revered King David, into the tribe of Judah. This helped seal their fate as “children of God”. This is where there is some controversy between Christian thought. According to Scripture, they’re a peaceful people whom are typically related to — or synonymous with — the Midianites. The Midianites were always held in a lofty light, having been peace-loving and Moses’ father-in-law Jethro was a Midianite (with some speculation that Moses was also a Midianite). This said, if Moses were a Midianite and if Kenites were another name for those from Midian, Moses would not be an evil and vile person would he? The latter part of that sentence brings me to the over-the-top and bizarre counterpoint to everything stated in Scripture: Kenites are the spawn of Satan. Yep, they’re descendants of Cain and thus, the world-bound demon spawn of Satan and all that is evil. This is the sole view of one right-wing, crazy, and seemingly racist “preacher” Arnold Murray of his own cult church the Shepherd’s Chapel. Before I even began wanting to believe a Christian this crazy could be believed, I consulted a reverend’s wife who just happens to be my sister. She confirmed what I’d read about his insane views of Orthodoxy and Christianity in general. Going off what he espouses to be Gospel, I tried to understand the etymology of the word Kenite in both Hebrew and English and why he would think what he says. The Hebrew translation of the word kenite would be Qayin which is the name Cain in early Hebraic text. As is the word Kajin and the Greek would be Kain. OK, so Murray might be onto something with the transliteration of the name but the word kenite itself also translates to “smith” so they could have been metalsmiths and not some blight upon the world.

Murray’s views are where he completely separates himself from Christian thought and his own bog of oddity. In fact, in apparent Christian form, he blasts any view other than his own:

Kenites

What about the use of the word Kenites? It is a Hebrew word that has only one meaning, “sons of Cain.” It does not mean Judah. The word Kenite cannot be translated Judah and is never used of Judah. Anyone saying that I use the word to describe Judah is not telling the truth; it would be a lie, because I have never said this.

Wow, someone got offended pretty easily. Now, we have to understand that he used the “original scriptures and documents” to formulate his propaganda orthodoxy. So why do many people translate the word so much differently than he? I think it’s because he’s insane and profoundly racist — based on other things told to me by members of the Shepherd’s Chapel.

With the brief history of the Kenites I’ve presented, why is there such a schism in Christianity over who they were? Since they’re almost solely mentioned only in the Bible, I’d figure it would be pretty cut and dry who they were. I simply chalk this up to another reason why Christianity is a bizarre cult that has no end. Rarely have I ever seen something so studied and laid before us with so many different opinions and ideas about the exact same source material.

Part 2 of the atheist debate is now online

May 10th, 2007 • 2 comments atheism, christianity, debate, tv

Just dug up the link http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3160648 from abcnews.com — although it was buried in the site.

Although the overall debate was poor, this second part is on the whole a bit better. Both sides skirt the issues proposed to them but tried to still make some point that people may link to whatever they were asked. Here’s some interesting things I found that the Christians ignored:

(Ray wants to state there were no people before the Bible)

(Kirk’s bizarre denial of evolution)

(Kirk is completely floored when Brian asks him “How can you not walk a mile without taking one step at a time?” and has absolutely nothing to say in defense. Instead he asks for the question again and skips to macroevolution)

(someone posed the question about Communist states acting as atheists)

(Kirk says it’s love of their faith and people, that’s why they’re killed. It’s in the audience questions segment).

(Ray skirts the entire issue by talking about light/darkness and ends up agreeing with the original question posed to him and could not explain why other than saying “It’s not true”. Kirk fumbles.)

(Ray talks about suffering instead of directly addressing the question. Uses distraction tactics to hinge upon fear mongering. Ray also says to not use “suffering” as a rejection of God although it has no basis in the question)

What the atheists missed or ignored:

(they share a great number of similarities but this is Kelly’s area of “expertise”)

(and I mean any godhead figure)

(other Atheists have postulated on this as well)

(Martin made the most salient point about this earlier in the debate)

Everything I think they missed were either questions directly asked to them or inferred by the questions asked to them. Believe me, some of this crazy stuff I could never make up.