The only mystery here is why this guy isn’t behind bars already

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This may sound a trifle conceited, but my regular followers will have noticed that I don’t post blogs that attacks religion directly, as often as I used to. You see, I’ve found over time that religion (aided and abetted by its adherents of course) does a bang-up job of trashing itself, all on its own.

However, I do make a point of posting about religious incidents that are so outrageous, as to make one seethe in anger at its imprudence. This is one such incident…

Pope Benedict XVI, has been under the cosh of late, and for good reason. His un-thoughtful utterances have not only further damaged (if that’s at all still possible) the Catholic faith, but his own credibility too. Over the weekend he told Irish Catholics that it is a mystery why priests and other church officials abused children. While the many years of denial has finally been exposed beyond any doubt, the Catholic Church is now dealing with the fallout, but instead of trying to make things right (is that possible?), or amends (what could possibly compensate?), they continue to act like the reasons for the abuse were beyond their human ability to control. Take this statement for example:

How are we to explain the fact that people who regularly received the Lord’s body and confessed their sins in the sacrament of Penance have offended in this way?

The attempt to make out that the rampant child abuse was a “mystery” is not only laughable, but outrageously mendacious. It is also an insult to the many that were hurt as a result of this dastardly behaviour.

His Unholiness should be told in no uncertain terms that there is no mystery here. The answer or part of it, is right there in that ridiculous statement he made. The repulsive ideology of the Eucharist, that man can “eat” of the body of Christ and “drink” of his blood, may not be the full answer, but it certainly points to it.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

If this book isn’t already a cult classic, it most certainly should be. Subtitled The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch and released around 1990, Good Omens is a collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett [although Pratchett did more of the writing and editing], both well-known fantasy authors in their own right.

Having not read either author’s work previously, this introduction to their comic genius has prompted me to purchase a few of their individual books which I’m eagerly looking forward to reading very soon.

The main plot revolves around the impending end of the world as we know it – Armageddon, and the efforts of the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, to prevent the Antichrist in the guise of Adam Young, an eleven-year old boy from bringing it about, having taken a liking (in their own ways) to humans and becoming inured to the comfortable life on earth over the millenia. Aziraphale we are told is the angel originally from the biblical Garden of Eden, while Crowley is better known as the talking snake who tempted Eve.

Being the respective representatives of God and Satan on earth, both form an unlikely friendship and conspire to ensure that the baby from Hell that Crowley is tasked to integrate into human society, does not actually grow up learning to differentiate between Good and Evil. Needless to say, in a comic mix-up at the hospital the future Antichrist winds up with the wrong family and grows up to be a relatively normal eleven-year boy who begins to utilize his unearthly powers without knowing it.

As the fateful day of the Rapture approaches, the race is on by both demon and angel to find the Antichrist a.k.a. Adam Young, to prevent him from initiating it. But there are also a host of other characters after him, some to help him end the world such as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding motorcycles, and others such as Anathema Device, the descendent of the witch Agnes Nutter, and Newton Pulsifer the witch hunter  descended from the man responsible for burning Agnes at the stake. The latter pair team up to find Adam and help save the world.

The rather neat ending in which the world is saved from annihilation was a bit of a let-down, but overall the many laughs and perceptive commentary about the state of the world up to that point, more than make up for it. I found the final thought from Adam [listed further below] is something everyone should aspire to.

Perceptive Commentary About the State of the World, or My Favorite Quotes

1. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.
2. It happened to them at a certain age, wives. Twenty-five blameless years, then suddenly they were going off and doing these robotic exercises in pink socks with the feet cut out and they started blaming you for never having had ti work for a living. It was hormones or something.
3. They’d been brought up to it and weren’t, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren’t. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.
4. It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
5. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.
6. People couldn’t become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.
7. There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that , despite thousands of years of manmade evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf.
8. “Churches? What good did they ever do? They’m just as bad. Same line o’ business nearly. You can’t trust them to stamp out the Evil One, ‘cos if they did, they’d be out o’ that line of business…”
9. He’d have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he’d have preferred a half-hour’s chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He’d sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn’t come. And he’d tried to become an official Atheist and hadn’t got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.
10. It was then that Marvin got religion. Not the quiet, personal kind, that involves doing good deeds and living a better life; not even the kind that involves putting on a suit and ringing people’s doorbells; but the kind that involves having your own TV network and getting people to send you money.
11. “I don’t see what’s so triffic about creating people as people and the gettin’ upset ‘cos they act like people,” said Adam severely. “Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.”
12. There never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

A sikh joke you say?

The Indian population of India and abroad really have to get over this ridiculous insecurity about their many religions.

Hot on the heels of India’s pathetic dispute with Facebook and Google over content that they myopically view as hostile to local religions, comes the Jay Leno affair. And only recently, celebrated author Salman Rushdie was forced to cancel a planned appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival after threats and protests from Islamist groups, while the Indian authorities apparently turned a blind eye.

Back to the Jay Leno affair: Jay Leno, host of the Tonight Show is in hot water following a quip he made about the Golden Temple in Amritsar being the holiday home of Republican, Mitt Romney. While some sensible Indians (Sikhs included) appreciated the joke and accepted it as quite normal,  it has apparently angered the Sikh community in the USA and in India. They believe that the joke is a deliberate affront to their religion.

However if you watch the clip below, you’ll find that Leno made no reference to Sikhs or the temple itself. So you have to wonder what all the fuss is about.

The obvious answer is that like the adherents of all other religions in the world, the Sikhs have this obtuse notion that their god or gods require constant defending against perceived attacks, both from adherents of competing religions, heathens and non-believers alike.

How utterly pathetic?

It’s time you life-sucking god-botherers grew up and started attending to the real problems in the world, not the imaginary ones that seem to make up all these pointless religions we have.

Christopher Hitchens (1949 – 2011)

 

Christopher Hitchens would have had no trouble whatsoever to write eloquently about the death of someone both greatly admired and despised, as he himself was. While I count myself in the former category, on the contrary, am finding it not so easy to express with the same degree of articulacy, what a great loss to humanity his death is.

The measure of integrity of the man shone brightly as he maintained his steadfast stance on anti-theism, right through a harrowing fight with cancer, and despite predictions from hate-filled religionists that he would eventually turn to their gods.

Hitchens had the sort of life that most people can only dream off; hard and fast religionists off course denying themselves that simple pleasure. He may be no more but his memory will live as long as man still cherishes true freedom.

Questions for Believers From Piet in Rotterdam

Piet from Rotterdam in the Netherlands asked me very politely to post a link to some thought-provoking questions he has compiled for believers.

Since I’ve asked some of these questions myself over the years, I am quite happy to oblige in providing the links to his compilation. I quite enjoyed reading through them although they’re targeted at believers mostly.

The English version [a work in progress]:

Questions for the Believer

The Dutch version:

95 stellingen / vragen aan een christen

The awful reality that must be faced should a God exist

I know a women who believes that her God has been testing her, for most of her life. She also believes that despite everything she goes through, her faith is still strong and true.

She has a son who is in his mid-twenties now, but has been mentally challenged since shortly after birth. The women believes that the condition of her son is one of the biggest tests her God has set for her.

Perhaps you think that I’m insensitive by writing about this? The truth is I feel sad for her son, but I have mixed feelings of pity and loathing for her.

Here we encounter the first horrific reality of a world with a god in it: the women is apparently eminent enough to warrant a God making another human being become the guinea pig in a test of her faith. The obvious conclusion is that this god does not value all human life equally. The obvious question is, by what criteria?

If anyone knows the answer to that question, I’m sure people everywhere who are afflicted by one form or other of physical or mental disability, are waiting to hear it. Yes, I’m talking about God’s pawns, or the world’s human guinea pigs.

Image via Wikipedia

But let us continue. The women lives a reasonably good life, but not everything goes the way she would like. She’s self-employed, has a roof over her head, a decent enough husband, reasonably good food to eat, takes the odd holiday away. By most standards, she’s in a better position than the majority of the world’s population.

However, she has shitty relatives who are constantly fighting each other, business is mostly not that good, she has to skip paying some bills from month to month, she’s frequently sick (her husband too), close friends and family members have died from or are slowly succumbing to cancer, and she just can’t seem to win that Lottery. Worse, her immediate neighbor has just got that new 57 inch flat screen TV and imported Italian tiles in the kitchen, and the idiot across the road drives a super hot top-of-the-range Mercedes, while her husband makes do with that lousy Mazda that forever breaks down.

At these times she complains to anyone that will listen that her god is testing her, but she is confident that she has the strength to abide, and will be rewarded some day.

What she has failed to contemplate is the fact that somewhere in Africa, there is a child who has not eaten for days, using the hot sun and twinkling stars for his roof. This child is not thinking about TV’s and tiles, not even about that unmarked shallow grave that is his destiny. This child is even unaware he is the object of a cruel game in which a God has gone beyond testing, to torturing.

This my friends is the astounding reality of a world with a God in it.

10 Popular Myths About Atheists and Atheism by Amanda Marcotte

Image via Wikipedia

I’m frequently accosted by readers that respond to my blog posts, who use one or more of several common myths about atheists and atheism in their arguments with me.

It’s therefore quite obliging of Amanda Marcotte, author of It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, to collate 10 of the most popular myths for us all.

In an article on AlterNet she writes as follows:

In a regular poll conducted by political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell on American political attitudes, atheists recently lost their spot as as the most disliked group in America to the Tea Party. Still, number two is simply way too high in the unpopularity rankings for a group of people who just happen to spend Sunday mornings in bed instead of in church. Polling data shows that nearly half of Americans would disapprove if their child married an atheist and nearly 40 percent of Americans don’t see atheists as sharing their vision of American society, numbers that outstripped similar prejudices toward Muslims and African Americans.

Of course, the real reason atheists are so hated has little to do with jealousy for all their free time, but largely because most Americans are better acquainted with myths than with the realities of atheists’ lives. Unfortunately, atheists often have these myths tossed in their faces, usually by believers who would rather talk about what they heard atheists are like rather than uncomfortable subjects such as the lack of proof for any gods.

And here’s one of my all-time favorites; never fails to amuse me every time it’s used against me:

Atheists are just angry with God. Atheists often point out the logical inconsistencies of many religious beliefs—such as the belief both that God is all-good and all-powerful, but he somehow also allows evil to exist—and believers use that to conclude that atheists are angry with God. We aren’t. You can’t be angry with a being that you don’t believe exists. I’m no angrier with God than I am angry with Zeus or the aliens that keep kidnapping drunks sleeping in their cars. Anger with religions for promoting false beliefs isn’t the same thing as being angry at the being that believers invented.

Catch the other 9 here on AlterNet.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t…

I belong to that group of individuals who believe that banning something only serves to push it underground and make it more desirable.

So it is with this in mind that I’m a little disturbed by an article in the Mail & Guardian about the banning of witchcraft and exploitation emanating from superstitious beliefs, by a political lobby group in the Indian state of Maharashtra.

Chanting to cure snakebites, claiming to be a reincarnated spouse to obtain sex, and charging for miracles could soon be banned by an Indian state seeking to stop charlatans preying on the vulnerable.

Many superstitions are widely held in India but a campaign group is lobbying hard for a new law in the western state of Maharashtra to outlaw several exploitative activities, with penalties of fines or up to seven years in jail. [more here]

According to the article, religious groups are already arguing that the banning is an attack on their religious freedoms. They will undoubtedly find support in the large Hindu population who thrive on superstition and archaic religious belief. The banning will ultimately only give their primitive needs added impetus when it becomes taboo.

While the proponents of the legislation known as Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and Other Inhuman, Evil Practices and Black Magic Bill, mean well, they could in fact be causing more harm.

It’s not a pleasant situation to be in, and is a damning indictment on mankind which is still prone to being deceived by religious charlatans, mostly through their own ignorance.

The rest of us are damned if we do something about it and damned if we don’t.

Misery and hope make strange bedfellows

A friend posted a religious text from Romans 5 on Facebook yesterday, to which I left the comment “That’s a really sad outlook on life.”

I can’t be sure though that my comment was exactly like that, because it has since been deleted.

The excerpt in question from the New International Version (NIV) of the bible goes like this:

…Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; ⁴ perseverance, character; and character, hope. ⁵ And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

I found a variation of this excerpt from the King James Version (KJV) which reads as follows:

³And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience;

⁴And patience, experience; and experience, hope:

⁵And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.

Both glorify pain and anguish and rely on faith and hope for the elimination of these afflictions. The upside to pain and anguish according to this religious text is the building of character and experience.

Essentially the text expects us [man] to accept and believe that an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity designed us [man] to suffer in order to build character and gain experience. We [man] is further expected to accept and believe that the imposition of this torture is designed to inculcate within us the pitiful feelings of hope and faith.

Anyone who does actually accept and believe this nonsense is utterly devoid of self-respect and actually deserves every bit of suffering coming his or her way. Any plausible deity who inflicts suffering on his or her creation, in order instill knowledge, or exact reverence, is not worthy of worship, but is deserving of derision.

Such a deity warrants his/her/its all-powerful ass being booted into a galaxy, infinite light years away from Earth. But since Superman, an eminently nicer supernatural entity hasn’t called around recently to oblige with this chore, it would be much simpler to suspend credulity…

I prefer to call it funny-mail

Came across this video today which reminded me of some of the comments I receive regularly on my blog posts.

Dawkins calls it hate-mail; I prefer to think of it as funny-mail because it’s generally quite amusing and it does leave me scratching my head sometimes trying to come up with witty rejoinders.

I am glad for it however, because everyone has the right to express themselves…

Richard Dawkins Reads His Hatemail