Then there's that whole kooky Old Testament....

Abraham and Isaac.

That story always creeped the shit out of me as a kid.

Never could figure out why that was supposed to be a laudable/wonderful story...


All right, let's say some random ordinary jackoff walks up to you, and tells you to kill your child.

You'd tell him to go fuck himself, right?

Okay, what if the asshole wore a stupid little crown, and called himself King?

Still tell him to go fuck himself, right?

Damned straight, and you'd tell him where to cram that crown too.

Okay, let's suppose said jackoff has super powers.
Let's say he's General Zod.
Superman wouldn't do that shit.
Not even the evil drunken Superman from part 3.

So okay, General Zod flies up to you, and for a lark, commands you to kill your kid.

You'd still tell him to go fuck himself, right?

Sure, just before you were vaporized, but at least you'd maybe give your kid time to run and hide.
Hopefully somewhere lined with lead.

Okay, would it make a difference if Zod had a little crown on?
Throne, scepter, robes?

No?

Okay, how about if Zod were zapped with a growth ray, and stood as tall as the Jolly Green Giant?

Okay, what if Zod had a Romulan cloaking device on his giant belt, and was invisible, and could only be perceived as a booming voice from a cloud?

Okay, what if you found out somehow that giant invisible King Zod was your dad?

What if he was everyone's dad?

Giant invisible King Zod got horny one night, slingshot-ed the sun, went back in time, and knocked up everyone, and he's everyone's baby-daddy.

Still not impressed?

Okay, so why is it this wonderful test of faith to almost kill your kid if you merely change Z to G?

Hmm?

See? It's an awful fucking story.
It's an awful moral.

No one sane would kill their kid on some voice's say so.

And no worthy deity would ask it.

Ah, but God bailed out on that one with a "Ha! Just kiddin!", at the end.
Right?

Ah, but Jephthah's daughter wasn't as lucky.
Same scenario, dead kid.

Still a lovely story? Still a lovely moral?

How about Andrea Yates?

That was some horrific shit.

I don't know anyone who thinks that was anything but horrible.
And the woman was clearly nuts.

But really, what would be the difference if the voice in her head had been real?

Wouldn't it be just as horrifying?

So explain to me again how The Binding Of Isaac is inspirational.
I really gotta hear this.
Or maybe I don't.

Anyway, that's just good ol' Abraham.

Let's not even get into all the children and babies horrifically slaughtered by God's Chosen People.
The Midianites spring to mind.

All those dead babies,....and yet it's Christians who are big on the whole "pro-life", deal.
No one's been able to walk me through the logic of how that works.

Are atheists the only ones reading the damned Bible inside and out???
It seems like it....

Ah, but allegedly, "Jesus fixed all that old testament stuff".
Despite saying "think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill".

Okay, let's say though that he did abolish the old testament.

Well, what's all the sobbing and hand wringing over the Ten Commandments in front of court houses then?
It's obsolete, it's abolished, let's move on.

Well, point is, no one REALLY gets their morals from the Bible.
No one stones their kids, no one stones adulterers, no one burns their daughters to death after giving her time to mourn her virginity.

Your morals come from somewhere else.
And wherever it is, it's the same place that I get them.
That is, if you're from a liberal democracy, in the western world.

You wanna see what a world under real old time religion looks like, check out Afghanistan.
Ah, now there's a happenin' vacation spot.

Anyway, sometimes, I think of saying all this stuff to the Jehovah's Witnesses door-knockers.
But...nah, it'd make them come back more.

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At what price comfort?? part 2.

One of the excuses for the existence of religion, besides the bare-bones fear of death sorts of comfort, is the whole "it's people trying to make sense of the world", and that that "making sense", gives comfort.

But that has a dark side, that makes me question if comfort justifies it.

This practice of every time there's a disaster, or horrible accident, to either blame the victims, or some random person, or group of people for it.

9/11 was because of gays and feminists, Hurricane Katrina was because of gays, and...I think the Tsunami was gays and abortion if I remember right....

My friend, Philip ranted about it more succinctly and clearly than I could...linky.

And here's the latest horrible article that started it off.

Well, I'm sure the blackhearted notion of God killing innocent kids that had nothing to do with anything to balance some cosmic scales somewhere comforts sick people like that, but is their comfort worth anything to you?

Not me.

I mean, I'm not saying she's glad the kids died, but the suffering of the survivors is clearly giving her an "I told you so", bit of smugness.

Clearly, this notion of the universe being in some sort of balance, of order, even if it's an unhinged scary totalitarian kind of order, seems to be the comforting factor, and seems to override any rational sense of decency in this person.

Well, the universe "making sense", may be comforting, but is it worth stepping over corpses?
Is it really that fucking important?
We're talking about dead kids here for fuck's sake.

And then there was the scumbag who blamed the Australian bush fires on abortion.

Does that warm the cockles of your heart that their cockles are warmed?

No?
I hope not.

If not, then "comfort", isn't the highest value, and I'm right to question it.

Is stuff like this worth being able to say "yep, you're going to Heaven, granny"?

Like I said in the last one, I'm no economist, but I'm not seeing the balance.

And speaking of imbalance, I'm the bastard for knocking comfort, but the comforted seem to be saying "fuck your moral disquiet, fuck dead kids, I need my comfort".

But...that's okay...culturally, we accept that...

Why, exactly?

Now, if you're religious, and stuff like what I've linked to offends you, join me.
Wash your hands of incidents like this.

I don't see enough of that happening.

The silence reads to me like if you go after stuff like this, your own beliefs might fall apart, and if that's the case with anyone out there reading this, then my point is made about the effects of religion.

Stuff like this is why I say it's bad for you.

And why I say "fuck comfort".

Heroin comforts.
Somewhere, someone is deriving comfort from fucking a corpse.

Nope, comfort doesn't cut it.

Fuck comfort.
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Oh, and...

...apparently, the finale of Battlestar Galactica was this weekend. I didn't watch, as I hate the show, and knew from the outset that it would drop the ball, as all shows with a big "mystery", at their core always seem to do, but I've been catching up on reviews, and there's a big wave of disappointment.

Disappointment I gleefully anticipated.

Yes, I'm prone to schadenfreude, sue me.

Well, turns out the answers to all the big questions were "goddidit!!", and ludditism.

HAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!

Swill.

Fuck you, Ron Moore. :)

Tolja so, BSG fans.
Ah, well.
Always the next pop culture abomination. Read More......

Ruminations of the day.

So, I did a bunch of navel gazing this weekend, about the nature of belief, and of faith.

In between, I watched a bunch of Star Trek episodes and movies.
Don't ask why, I don't even know.
Just what I felt like watching.
Anyhoo, had the impulse to see Star Trek 6 (TUC), and Star Trek 1 (TMP) back to back for a bookend effect, to see in one fell swoop how the movie franchise evolved, and to mentally compare it to the trailer and leaked materials for the new one, and yadda yadda....

Plus, Star Trek has tackled the whole religion & faith deal over the decades, so I was hoping for some insight.

TNG's "who watches the watchers", is as atheist an episode as you're likely to get.
Picard reveals himself to be an unabashed atheist in that one, looks right down his nose at supernatural belief.

"Horrifying... Dr. Barron, your report describes how rational these people are. Millennia ago, they abandoned their belief in the supernatural. Now you are asking me to sabotage that achievement, to send them back into the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear? No!"
- Picard


But, TMP is an odd beast.
Structurally, it's a total knockoff of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

So, the message is somewhat similar.
Something about logic not being enough, so some magic extra human ingredient is needed.
They're fuzzy about nailing down what it is, in one breath, it's "irrational human emotions", in another, it's the imagination needed to postulate other dimensions, and the way it's worded, you get the idea it's also faith.

But faith in what?

Gene Roddenberry was a Bible-bashing secular humanist, so...it certainly wasn't Jesus.

Anyway, that added to my pre-existing state of navel-gazing, and I got to thinking, y'know, that even if the fact claims of religion are total bullshit, maybe this "faith", ingredient is something the human brain needs, that even if the things it has attached to over history are either foolish, or horrible, maybe "faith", is that little oomph in the brain that gets you up over that hill, or whatever.

Maybe.

And if that's true, maybe, just maybe, the human brain is just not ready to be universally secular, and let the babies have their bottles, because who am I to fuck with their little hallucinations if everyone has them?

...and then I see shit like this and these particular people don't just want their beliefs crammed into school, they want to destroy education itself, and I'm like "nahhh, this shit needs to be railed against, and railed against hard".

And it takes me right back to "at what price, this comfort?", and the Batman moment, and at the very least, organized religion is a fucking mess that I wish would go away with a whimper rather than kicking and thrashing and damaging things like it is.

And then I'm right back to faith IS the problem.
Faith is swallowing certain ideas without evidence.
And that's how you end up in these little clubs, and then the clubs go crazy, and do shit like in the linked article.

And Roddenberry knew that, so what was he getting at in TMP?

No fucking idea, and in the 70's I don't think America knew.
I think "faith in faith", and this impulse for a hippie-dippie secular religion, was where we were at at the time.

And wait, when V'Ger makes the leap of faith, it transcends into the higher dimensions.
Well...there you go, physical evidence.
That's what us atheists want.
If there's proof, it's not faith.
V'Ger did that shit, Kirk, Spock, and Mcoy saw it.

*Sigh*...lotta drugs in the 70's, I think I'll leave it at that.

And I'll stick with Picard's take on religion. Read More......

The Batshit Files (audio version)

Ta daa.
My first audio blog!

Thanks to Sharon, Steve, and Margaret for bugging me to do it. :P

Yeah, audio quality is a bit crunchy, but..eh.

Here's the text to read along with if you like.
(The Batshit Files)

batshit3 - Read More......

Bullshit/batshit of the day.

Glenn Beck's crying routine.

I don't really need to say more, do I?

If you didn't know that Glenn Beck was batshit, or that the crying routine was bullshit, well, as Lewis Black would say, I want you to wear tinfoil, so I know where you are.

I was going to link to Youtube clips of this shit...but it was too fucking painful to watch.

I'd rather listen to "Frankie Teardrop", again than watch Glenn Beck fake cry.

Fuck it, here you go, Frankie Teardrop.

Happy nightmares, keeds.



Little note while you watch/listen, Bruce Springsteen loves this song, and has done a cover of it onstage.

So, if you find yourself at a Springsteen concert someday, shout out a request for it.
It's a catchy little ditty, he just might belt it out for ya.

Me, I've got it stuck in my head, and keep humming it at unwelcome moments.
Try it in line at the bank sometime. Read More......

"The American Dream", how they got the chickens to side with Colonel Sanders.

How did they get poor working families to vote Republican?
That was a neat trick.

Like getting slaves to be Christian.
That was a good one too.

A factory worker or farmer never invented modern conservatism.
No way in Hell that happened.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Come on.

Especially not the "parasite", rhetoric you see thrown around, or the class hatred, or the terror of poverty, and the hatred of the poor it morphs into, and on and on.

Y'know, that whole mentality we've got going on in this country.

Clearly it's propaganda handed down from the Rockerfellers and Hearsts of the world.

Fuck those people.

I think how they sold it, was this delusion that you can be one of them if you just put enough years in.
Or if you invent the right magic widget.

So, once they get you fantasizing you are Rockerfeller, you adopt his worldview, and identify with guys of his class, and then you get to think you're a part of their little team, and then you give them votes, etc, etc.

These people don't give a fuck about you.
You're not on their team.
You're not in their club.
Wake the fuck up.
They don't give a fuck about you.

And they're not "self made".

No one is when you dissect the hell out of it.
Everything in life is a web of complex interdependence.

Hell, that fucking market they worship kind of depends on it.

Hey, maybe you can build yourself up with hard work, or invent the right widget, and be the next Bill Gates, who knows?
Maybe.
Big maybe.
This is the sort of country where you can do that sort of thing.
Granted.

But there's this dark side okey-doke that comes with it that's a pile of bullshit.
That nasty bit of junkmail slipped into the brochure.

And you saw it bare its fangs in those terrorized bawling faces in the crowd when McCain lost.

Was there any need of that?

I don't fucking think so.

These attitudes in our culture go to nasty extremes, and there's no need of it, except to fuel this little fairy tale that keeps the real people in charge in power.

I dunno what the antidote to it is, but it's unpleasant, it holds us back, and it needs to stop.

I suppose it could probably boil down to that little corner that gets turned where ambition warps into greed, and confidence warps into narcissism.

Well, in a country built on capitalistic achievement, it's no accident that narcissism is the American disease.

And I could let it go, but it hurts people, and makes them swallow bullshit.
Then you end up with all this division, and anger, and fear, and that leads us to the exact opposite of what we set out to be.

Again, I don't know what the antidote is, but it's the 21st century, time to move on, folks.

Stop listening to The Colonel, chickens.
There isn't corn in there, it's a guy with an axe.

Look out, is all I'm saying.
You wanna march up that little walkway, just remember that I warned ya.

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