More On The Madness Of Muslims: The Bloody Hands Of The Boko Haram

Feel the white-knuckled outrage:

Boko Haram carnage in Nigeria: over 60 dead, «the children were burned alive»

At least 65 people were killed in the attack committed by militants of the Islamist group Boko Haram on the outskirts of Maiduguri in northeast Nigeria.
According to the armed forces of Nigeria, were attacked the village of Galore, located a few kilometres East of Maiduguri.
AFP referring to escaped the massacre of the bacoor Alumina eyewitness reports that the militants threw the incendiary bomb hut, and inside were heard the cries of the dying, including children.
According to him, the massacre lasted about four hours.
It concluded that in the crowd of inhabitants who had fled to a neighboring village, exploded three suicide bombers.
The real number of victims may far exceed current estimates, as are murdered in the surrounding Bush where they were hunted by extremists.
Boko Haram («Western education is a sin» in the Hausa language) — an Islamist group operating in the North and North-East of Nigeria. The militants also attacked the neighbouring countries of Niger, Cameroon and Chad, reminds «Interfax».
Boko Haram is seeking to establish an Islamic Caliphate and the imposition of Sharia (Islamic law) throughout Nigeria. It is against Western education, democracy and the principle of separation of powers, and also against wearing Western clothes and all the other elements of the «alien» culture. The extremists frequently attack Christian communities and churches and educational institutions.
In March 2015 the group has sworn allegiance to the terrorist organization «Islamic state» (banned in Russia).

Mad dogs all. Xenophobic psychopaths who hide their inhumanity behind religion. Bloody handed bastards who have abdicated reason for the crazy voices in their heads telling them to wash away the ‘sins’ of others in blood, to ignore the cries of the innocent dying, to revel in wrongness because ‘Allah’ (peanut butter and jelly be upon him) had some pedophiliac illiterate dictate astonishing nonsenses.
The desert does not create great men: it parboils their brains and puts sand up their asses, driving them insane, giving them crazy ideas about how to conserve bodily fluids.
The Boko Haram are rabid animals, unworthy of the designation ‘human’.
Till the next post then.

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More On The Madness Of Muslims: The Evil Of Honor

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis

I have said this many times here, and on the old blog: the litmus test of any civilization (or an ideology, let’s add that too) that determines its worthiness, is the treatment of women and children. And it’s not enough these mad dogs take children as sex slaves, but that they slaughter other adults to enforce their barbarism.

Case in point;

Her Father Shot Her in the Head, as an ‘Honor Killing’

WHETHER it wins or not, the Oscar nominee with the greatest impact — saving lives of perhaps thousands of girls — may be one you’ve never heard of.

It stars not Leonardo DiCaprio but a real-life 19-year-old Pakistani woman named Saba Qaiser. Her odyssey began when she fell in love against her family’s wishes and ran off to marry her boyfriend. Hours after the marriage, her father and uncle sweet-talked her into their car and took her to a spot along a riverbank to murder her for her defiance — an “honor killing.”

First they beat Saba, then her uncle held her as her own father pointed a pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. Blood spewed, Saba collapsed and her father and uncle packed her body into a large sack and threw it into the river to sink. They then drove away, thinking they had restored the family’s good name.

Incredibly, Saba was unconscious but alive. She had jerked her head as the gun went off, and the bullet tore through the left side of her face but didn’t kill her. The river water revived her, and she clawed her way out of the sack and crawled onto land. She staggered toward a gasoline station, and someone called for help.

About every 90 minutes, an honor killing unfolds somewhere in the world, usually in a Muslim country. Pakistan alone has more than 1,000 a year, and the killers often go unpunished.

Watching the documentary about Saba, “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness,” I kept thinking that just as in the 19th century the central moral challenge for the world was slavery, and in the 20th century it was totalitarianism, in this century the foremost moral issue is the abuse and oppression that is the lot of so many women and girls around the world.

I don’t know whether “A Girl in the River” will win an Oscar in its category, short subject documentary, but it is already making a difference. Citing the film, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan has promised to change the country’s laws so as to crack down on honor killings.

Saba’s story underscores how the existing law lets people literally get away with murder when honor is the excuse. After doctors saved Saba’s life — as police officers guarded the door so her father didn’t return to finish the job — she was determined to prosecute her father and uncle.

“They should be shot in public in an open market,” she told the filmmaker, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, “so that such a thing never happens again.”

The police arrested Saba’s father, Maqsood, and the uncle, Muhammad, and their defense was that they did the right thing.

“She took away our honor,” Maqsood said from his jail cell. “If you put one drop of piss in a gallon of milk, the whole thing gets destroyed. That’s what she has done. … So I said, ‘No, I will kill you myself.’”

Maqsood said that after shooting Saba he went home and told his wife, “I have gone and killed your daughter.” He added: “My wife cried. What else could she do? I am her husband. She is just my wife.”

Perpetrators of honor killings often are not prosecuted because Pakistani law allows families of victims to forgive a killing. So a man kills his daughter, the rest of the family forgives him, and he’s off the hook.

Tremendous pressure was applied to Saba by community elders to pardon her father and uncle. In the end, her husband’s older brother — the head of her new family — told her to forgive and move on. “There is no other way,” he said. “We have to live in the same neighborhood.”

Saba complied, and her father and uncle were released from prison. “After this incident, everyone says I am more respected,” her father boasted. “I can proudly say that for generations to come none of my descendants will ever think of doing what Saba did.” The families still live near each other, although the father insists he will not try again to kill Saba.

The way to reduce honor killings is to end the impunity. Saba tried to do her part, and let’s hope Prime Minister Sharif does indeed end the legal system of forgiveness.

“I wanted to start a national discourse about the issue,” says Obaid-Chinoy, the film’s director. “Until we send people to jail and make examples of them, honor killings will continue.”

Since 9/11, the United States has spent billions of dollars reshaping Afghanistan and Pakistan with the military toolbox; I suspect we would have achieved more if we had relied to a greater extent on the education and women’s empowerment toolboxes.

A starting point would be to encourage governments to protect teenage girls from fathers who want to murder them. Chipping away at this broad pattern of gender injustice is in the interest of all of us. It is our century’s great unfinished business.

Yep, keep adding to the list of mad dogs who should be taken out back and shot in the head. That’s all these two psychotics deserve.

The foremost item is the hypocrisy: both Christianity (free will? HA!) and Islam (not supposed to compel religion, bone up on the fucking thing sometime) is that regardless of their words and teachings, imans and priests (ministers too, if you’re being pedantic) regularly force others in one way or another, to conform to the ‘norm’ or face harsh penalties. And the people in charge of these things tend to be hairy-eyed squalid lunatics, eyes full of an imaginary glory and afterlife.

Butchering and raping women and children is NOT the heroic act of some ‘divine vessel’ – it is the act of a disconnected mentally unhinged individual (or more). If these buttplugs had been doing this in the name of the Almighty Bob, they’d have been castigated and imprisoned. But because they hide under the umbrella of religion, there are no consequences.

If you kill women and rape children, I could care LESS why. You did it. And everyone should get equal treatment. So this makes you a savage, regardless of the WHY of it. A voice told you to? Get help, or get out. A book told you? What, are you a gullible child, to blindly follow it, and cause mayhem and slaughter to those around you?

No more free passes for these psychos, boys and girls. Different culture? Don’t care. Different country? Don’t care. There is no afterlife, so we have to correct this. Here. Now.

And don’t give me that ‘violence doesn’t solve anything’ crap. Yeah, and Hitler was soooo amenable to reason and rationality that Chamberlain managed to avoid World War II.

Till the next post.

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2015 - A Good Year To Be Secular

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis


As the hours and days and months all draw to a close, a winding down of events and lives, 2015 was a very good year to be secular.


Religion is more and more going into decline, and the landslide decision of Obegefell vs. Hodges made gay marriage constitutional in every state of the land (though how they pulled it off without scumbags like Scalia, Roberts, and Thomas interfering, I could not guess).


And for the wistful, sentimental thought:


As an atheist, I would not force my views onto others, anymore than I would appreciate that being done to me. My issue is not with crutches for the weak of heart and mind: it gets you through the bad nights, who am I to piss upon it? No, rather my problems is with the religious who would force their beliefs on myself and others. Gay marriage is a one instance; in the ancient world, gay marriage was not only practiced, but most folks couldn’t give a fuck if it didn’t inconvenience their days or their lives. Once the Christians took over, they stopped it right fast, even tried to stomp it out of existence (homosexuality). Also as point of fact, the Catholic Spaniards were horrified at the ‘abomination’ being practiced in Central America, that they proceeded to slaughter and torture countless innocent victims.


No, much as I’d like to see religion vanish/disappear, the fact is that nobody should play the thought police, or the ‘morals squad’.


And that should apply in all things. I want a country where the rich and the poor are treated equally, not based on pay scale. I want a country where everyone is treated the same, a level playing field. I want a country where atheist, muslim, christian, jew, all are equals, no free passes, no special treatment. No more ‘non-debates’ – climate change is real, evolution is a fact, nobody is getting ‘persecuted’, and nobody is better than anyone else.


Because let’s face it: religion tears down individuals, and rebuilds them. In the meantime, they get infused with all sorts of nonsense – the master-slave mentality, that precursor of xenophobia that is tribalism, that dishonest elevation of the religious person being ‘saved’ (which is shorthand for un-equal).


So here’s to the end of a pretty decent year overall, and hopefully more inroads will be paved for the secular folk that are to come.


Cheers!


Till the next post then.

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More On The Madness Of Muslims: Overpopulation Is NOT The Answer!

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis

There is an ongoing attitude in our species – MORE is BETTER, especially when it comes to having children. The medieval concept that some cosmic babysitter is going to come swooping in and clean up our collective messes is simply stupid. And the religious concept? Why, we need more ‘believers’ because they’ll lead the charge against the un-believers! Let’s face it: religious people need soldiers because they’re always at war with someone. And all this is just an extension of sexual dimorphism, which has run its course, and we should just discard.

One of the more ridiculous statements ever heard: “I want to have a MILLION kids after we get married!”

This sort of short-sighted idiocy is all too prevalent. The presumption is that there always has been and always will be, room on this planet. The assumption that women are just around to be uteri with heads is just bullshit. It’s this attitude that fosters the rape culture of the Big 3: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

And this medieval attitude is expressed in this headline:

Muslim men having '20 children each' because of polygamy, peer claims

Baroness Cox, a cross-bench peer, says that Sharia Law is leading to 'shocking' discrimination against Muslim women.

Muslim men in some communities are having up to 20 children each because of polygomy and the rise of "religiously sanctioned gender discrimination" under Sharia Law, peers have warned.

Baroness Cox, a cross-bench peer, highlighted a series of "shocking" examples of the impact of Sharia law on Muslim women in Britain as she called for them to be given greater protection under equality legislation.

She disclosed one case in which a 63-year-old man tried to divorce his 23-year-old wife and arrange her marriage to a Pakistani man who needed a visa.

He asked a gynecologist to "repair the hymen" of his wife so she could remarry, and stood to make £10,000 "for effecting the arrangement".

"Such shocking cases surely cannot be allowed to continue," she said. "The rights of Muslim women and the rule of law in our land must be upheld."

In other examples, Baroness Cox revealed that Muslim men divorce their wives by simply saying or writing "I divorce you" three times.

She added: "My Muslim friends tell me that in some communities with high polygamy and divorce rates, men may have up to 20 children each.

Clearly, youngsters growing up in dysfunctional families may be vulnerable to extremism and demography may affect democracy."

She put forward proposals to close a loophole in the Equality Act which she said enables Sharia courts to practice sexual discrimination.

Baroness Deech, another cross-bench peer, supported the bill and said: "We must not tolerate the sweeping of violence against women or children under the carpet by any religion in the name of faith."

Labour's Baroness Donaghy, a former chair of the arbitration service Acas, also backing the Bill, said it was not that long ago that women were unequal before the law.

"We cannot afford to go backwards and tolerate a situation where any woman is living in fear and isolation.

"More needs to be done. This is not confined to Sharia law or Muslim religion. These parallel laws which discriminate against women have existed and may still exist in other religions."

Lord Green of Deddington, chairman of MigrationWatch, said Britain was entirely different to Muslim countries, adding: "Those who come must accept that."

The independent crossbench peer said: "We must be prepared to insist that there can be only one law.

"We must get away from what I call the Rotherham complex where the authorities were so afraid of offending a minority community that they turned a blind eye to the appalling abuse of young mainly British girls."

Lord Faulks, the justice minister, highlighted a government review of the operation of Sharia Councils but said that new laws were not needed as there are already protections in common law and existing legislation.

All of this nonsense is insane. Women aren’t inferior beings to be treated like chattel, no matter what some book of fairy tales says. Religious polygamy was created to forge armies of believers, because religious people are always at war. This is just sexual dimorphism taken to an idiotic level. The concept of ‘if there’s more of us, we WIN” is short-sighted and moronic.

And for those readers who say, ‘so what?’, here is some alarming news:

The human population has been growing continuously since the end of the Black Death, around the year 1400, although the most significant increase has been in the last 50 years, mainly due to medical advancements, increases in agricultural productivity and the historically unique availability of abundant cheap energy. The rate of population growth has been declining since the 1980s. Most contemporary[clarification needed] estimates for the carrying capacity of the Earth under existing conditions are between 4 billion and 16 billion.[citation needed] In 2013 the human population was 7 billion. By 2025 the world population is expected to grow by an additional 1 billion. Depending on which estimate of overpopulation is used, human overpopulation may or may not have already occurred.

The InterAcademy Panel Statement on Population Growth, circa 1994, has stated that many environmental problems, such as rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, global warming, and pollution, are aggravated by the population expansion. Other problems associated with overpopulation include the increased demand for resources such as fresh water and food, starvation and malnutrition, consumption of natural resources (such as fossil fuels) faster than the rate of regeneration, and a deterioration in living conditions. However, some believe that waste and over-consumption, especially by wealthy nations, is putting more strain on the environment than overpopulation.

The fact is, we as a species WILL run out of room, very very soon. This ridiculous concept of some imaginary cosmic baby-sitter coming down to ‘clean house’? Never gonna happen. Instead, imagine your grand-children and great grand-children being stacked like cordwood while they’re still alive, millions (perhaps billions) fighting and struggling, breathing and eating the only worthwhile occupation.

’

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The World I Want To Live In…

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis

Violence is the last resort of the failed argument, and the first resort of the coward. - Zen Proverb.

Let’s take a step back for a second, from the complaining and outrage, to get a better overview.

Recently, a Muslim poster from a couple of posts ago, accused me and/or this site (Oasis), of advocating murdering Muslims. This is untrue. The only times I advocate something like that, is when faced with the crazy assholes (of any religion) who go about blathering about how their version of their religion is hollering for genocide, slavery, ideocide, and how blood and fire is the only way to ‘cleanse’ an unclean world. These people (if they can be called that: there is a point where any human can abdicate from humanity) are a blight. A crazy-ass bloodlusting hairy-eyed fanatic is for the most part a rabid dog. I consider a member of ISIS or Boko Haram to be equal to that mad asshole Manson. Or McVeigh. Anyone who is willing to resort to violence to enforce their vision of the world on others, is bugfuck crazy. I don’t care if you hale from the Middle East or Minnesota, Arabia or Indiana. It’s not geographic, it’s not demographic. If I were handed a gun, and told to shoot Manson in the head, I’d do it. Probably without hesitation. ‘Cause that guy, he’s abdicated. He only looks human. This is neither a failed argument nor cowardice: some things just need to be done, regardless of how distasteful they are.

Certainly this falls under the purview of Hume’s Is/Ought guillotine – that is, my idea of a ‘perfect’ world is based on how mucked up this one is. It’s easy to preach reform, it’s harder to instate it.

Here then, is my idealized version of the world.

The world I want to live in….

Is free of mentally deranged individuals hiding under the umbrella of religion. (Yeah, likely impossible)

Is not based on payscale. Everyone gets free housing, food, medical care. Anything else, you gotta work for it.

Does not discriminate based on religion, or the lack of it.

Only gives free passes to the mentally and physically challenged (and even those should be limited: having Down’s Syndrome, for instance, is not a free pass to massacre people, any more than is someone’s religion).

Where everyone is equal, where everything is equitable. Where women and gays have equal rights, where someone’s belief doesn’t fuck up my (or anyone else’s) life that doesn’t believe likewise.

It’s too much to ask, I realize that. Our species, we’re pretty amazing critters when we’re not being idiots.

I hope that we’re drawing to the end of the Age Of Tribalism. That someday, people can live in peace not fear, where poverty is gone, and we as a species use reason as a tool, where being intellectual is acceptable and not a disease.

The old explanations are just that: old. We were born in sin, fucked up from the start, that’s a terrible justification. Who would do that to a child, let alone a nascent species, except some terrible psychopath with too much time on his (imaginary) hands.

I say there is no sin, only responsibility. We are responsible to and for one another. Because there is no Allah, Yahweh, Brahma, Jesus, or any other daft deity looking out for us. We are on our own. It is the weak mind that looks for external excuses or validation: there is no fate or destiny outside of what we forge for ourselves. We are like swords, our wills hammering out our purpose on the anvil of reality.

Remember this: we are alone, but not to each other. Be responsible. Be exceptional. Be good, be safe, but not at another’s expense if it can be helped.

But take no shit from anyone – because there’s limits to everything, even the universe. Prompt no harm, cause no harm, but don’t allow harm to come to you.

Till the next post then.

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Original Sin And The Slaughter Of Self Esteem

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis

“The idea of original sin--of guilt with no possibility of innocence, no freedom of choice, no alternatives--inherently militates against self-esteem. The very notion of guilt without volition or responsibility is an assault on reason as well as on morality. Sin is not original, it is originated--like virtue.” ― Nathaniel Branden

There are few things more pernicious, more insidious in our culture, than this bankrupt concept of ‘original sin’.

It may have served our ancestors millennia ago as as explanation of why we as a species fuck up so frequently, but it is an outmoded, dated concept submerged in superstitious nonsense.

As anyone reading this knows, it is hard being born human, because we collectively face so many obstacles growing up. Learning how to walk, talk, handle utensils, etc., most of that is a trial. But the budding personality? That constant search for identity? Mixed in with puberty, it is easy to state that it’s a sort of torment for just about everyone (anyone out there who had an easy time of it, please speak up. We could always call Ripley’s.). Generally, I think we can all agree, it’s a real trial just existing.

Of course two (or more) millennia ago, our ancestors (barbarians all) had a rotten time figuring this all out. Why do people fuck up so often? Why is it so difficult to just exist? Well, back then they just made shit up. There were all kinds of explanations, but usually humans go with the simplest explanation, regardless of how much sense it makes (or even if it doesn’t). Mostly the god nod of ‘original sin’ was reinforced at gunpoint, swordpoint or spearpoint, plus constant repetition, until everyone just accepts this at face value.

Now I’m going to skip the usual (and overdone) snickering at a talking reptile offering a piece of fruit to the original ingénue (ridiculous as it is), and address the special pleading folderol. So let’s subtract the supernatural, and watch as the craziness unfolds.

Hypothetically speaking: we have an adult raising a child. Once the child reaches some glimmer of sentience, the adult tells the child that s/he was born deficient. In fact, the child is told in great depth and measure that just because s/he exists, that child is completely screwed up. And why? Great-great-great-great grandma did something wrong, something that permanently stained all subsequent offspring to this day. And all the offspring have to make some sort of emotional commitment to a designated ‘designer’ in order to escape this genetic mishap. Mind you, there is no ‘cure’: there is only the temporary balm of throwing some emotion into the air, begging the very sky itself for some sort of alleviation. At least until the person dies.

Does anyone see the disconnect here? If it were ‘gawd’, then it’s okay. But if a real human did this sort of garbage, Special Services would be plucking the child from that human’s care. Because not only is that scenario stupid, it’s psychotic. Personally, I find it amazing that I even accepted this placidly back in the day, but that’s because the idea of ‘sin’ is so entrenched in our culture, that it’s generally accepted as ‘wisdom’, even though it is not.

So, it’s no small wonder, that when fed with a false premise (lay.ered by a perverse suppression of sexual drive), humanity has managed to harm itself, both physically and psychologically in the long run.

That we made it this far, with our capacity for self-destruction and self-deception, that is by far the greater testament to our species.

There is no sin – there is only responsibility.

Till the next post, then

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Sharia Sucks Dick: Unidirectional Marriage

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis
Really, how much more proof do we need that Ass-lame is completely bugfuck crazy?

Sudanese woman who married a non-Muslim sentenced to death

A Sudanese doctor who married a Christian man and who was convicted earlier this week on charges of apostasy was sentenced to death on Thursday, judicial officials said.

According to the Sudanese officials, 26-year-old Meriam Ibrahim, whose father was Muslim, was convicted on Sunday and given four days to repent and escape death. She was sentenced after that grace period expired, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The sentencing drew condemnation from western embassies in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, and international rights groups, including Amnesty International.

The court in Khartoum also ordered Ibrahim be given 100 lashes for committing zina – an Arabic word for illegitimate sex – for having sexual relations with a non-Muslim man.

The couple married in 2011 and have a child, born 18 months ago. Sudanese law does not recognise Ibrahim's marriage to a non-Muslim.

Ibrahim can appeal against her death sentence as well as the 100 lashes.

As in many Muslim nations, Muslim women in Sudan are prohibited from marrying non-Muslims, though Muslim men can marry outside their faith. By law, children must follow their father's religion.

Amnesty International said Ibrahim's conviction and death sentence were "truly abhorrent".

"The fact that a woman has been sentenced to death for her religious choice, and to flogging for being married to a man of an allegedly different religion is appalling and abhorrent," the London-based rights group said. "Adultery and apostasy are acts which should not be considered crimes at all."

The group also called for Ibrahim's immediate and unconditional release.

Sudan introduced Islamic sharia laws in the early 1980s, a move that contributed to the resumption of an insurgency in the mostly animist and Christian south of Sudan. An earlier round of civil war lasted 17 years and ended in 1972. The south seceded in 2011 to become the world's newest nation, South Sudan.

Sudan's current ruler, Omar al-Bashir, is an Islamist who seized power in a 1989 coup.

Really? Seriously? Let’s see if I get this straight: that illiterate pedophile Mohammed (PB& J be upon his name) pretty much borrowed 75% of Judaism’s mythology, but retrofitted it to suit the cultural mindset (the obscure reference I’m using here is that in Judaism, Jewishness is measured by the birth mother, not the DNA contributor, back then, it could be someone else) so that it was even more nasty and patriarchal.

What is happening here, and what most of the world is blinded to (gee, thanks for fucking nothing, you asshat accomodationists), is that women are pretty much still chattel in the eyes of most of the religious countries, especially in ass-backwards Africa and the Middle East.

It should not stand.

The rape culture of Islam shackles women like slaves –damages them, mutilates them, makes them the property of their husbands or fathers. It is a sick, malevolent mindset that the other two Abrahamic religions outgrew: the big question is, will our species survive this third spasmic evolution?

Maybe time will tell, on the proviso that there is any time left.

Till the next post, then.

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Allegories Gone Wild: A War On Tugs, Or A Tug Of War?

^{Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis}

8

Then Judah said to Onan, “Sleep with your brother’s wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to raise up offspring for your brother.” ⁹ But Onan knew that the child would not be his; so whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother. ¹⁰ What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death also. – Genesis, Chapter 38

But Rosie, you're all right
(You wear my ring)
When you hold me tight
(Rosie, that's my thing)
When you turn out the light
(I got to hand it to me)
Looks like it's me and you again tonight, Rosie – Jackson Browne, Rosie

Courtesy of the Atheist Republic:

Mormons Release Video Declaring War on Masturbation

 

It’s time to cry havoc, and let slip the floggers of war. (oh…all right. Not very good. Trot out your own damned euphemisms then.)

It seems as if the Mormon church is trying to get a handle on this ‘problem’. But hey, wait: how is it a problem? It isn’t. It’s a normal, natural step for people to understand  their own sexuality. In fact, most professionals say that it’s actually quite healthy (unless of course, the practice interferes with relationships, work, or general intercourse with other people).

So why do these wearers-of-holy-underwear, these baptizers-of-the-dead, these polygamous sanctimonious purveyors of a hat-born religion give a rat’s ass in a whirlwind what anyone does with their privates in private? That’s right – because old Scratch is giving us all hand-jobs to lure us away from Jebus.

All because some nitwit in the lying bible made up a story about sperm landing in the dirt.

Ridiculous.

Till the next post, then.

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More On The Madness Of Muslim: Faith Expressed Via Dynamite

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis

Can’t we all just get along? – Rodney King

Obviously we can’t. And the jury’s been in for a decade for the ‘religion of peace’. The bad press that Ass-lame receives on a regular basis disproves the title. Such as the following:

45 Killed in Sectarian Bombings in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — In a deadly sectarian attack, at least 54 people were killed Friday evening and about 75 wounded when two bombs ripped through a town in a tribal region of northwestern Pakistan, officials said. A militant group affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility.

That anyone on earth would not only step up, but to be proud of such wanton cruelty, monstrous madness, shredding of the innocent…if ours were indeed the civilized world we wished it to be, this would’ve prompted swift and relentless justice to be wreaked on the heads of those who would boast of such a crime.

Sadly, it is common news. Too common. Our species inherent tribalism and xenophobia might be the end of civilization – how long before one who would train suicide bombers is granted access to the wrong launch codes?

What else is a religion, any religion, but a cloak to disguise the sociopaths among us? A comic book fantasy for the arrested adolescence? The manic mania of the self-loathing narcissist?

Till the next post, then.

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J’accuse! What Religion Is Truly Responsible For…

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis

And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; Bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein. Genesis 9:7

"We have met the enemy and he is us." – Pogo

Puff pieces. None of them ever cut to the bone. Every one of them dilly-dallies around the issues. Most articles adopt a shrug-hey-let-‘em-have-it-if-it makes-them-feel-good attitude.

The truth of the matter is this: religion isn’t responsible for anything. That’s the fallacy of reification. The fact is, that people are responsible. For everything. Good and bad. Natural selection doesn’t select on intelligence. It selects based on adaptability, and being easily influenced is a facet of adaptability.

But this religion nonsense still has got to go.

It propagates a series of vast lies: that some otherworldly other is watching out for you personally, that there’s some invisible ledger being kept and all debts and injuries will finally be balanced; in short, someone else will come along and sort your mess for you.

It’s an insane and irresponsible mindset. It gives the lazy thinker all the excuses they might need: I’ll not use birth control, because the result is gawd’s will. My gawd wants me to have multiple children (see the quote from above). Gawd is against birth control because some pointy-hatted asshole in Italy says so.

At this juncture, anthropocentric global warming is fact – the only people who battle that are the mooks fiercely clenching their SUV’s to their chests in denial. We are exhausting this planet’s resources. This is no longer speculation or science fiction. As a species, we are going to wreck this little blue pearl within a century or so.

We are coming to an agonizing realization: people are going to have to start taking reproductive responsibility. We have upwards of an estimated 100 million abandoned children living in the streets – and the upper percentiles are usually in the heavily religious countries. Starving children? Human trafficking? Yeah, there’ll be no divine intervention there. It’s down to us.

Pretty soon, it will get to the point where governments will be required to legislate and enforce a limit to family size. For the sake of our species. Regardless of fuzzy-wuzzy feelings or religious belief. Sad but true.

So go forth, and fuck responsibly.

Till the next post, then.

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More Good News….Ban On Gay Marriages Has Been Lifted.

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis
California. Often likened to a bowl of cereal – it’s full of fruits, flakes and nuts.

It’s no real surprise (despite the best efforts of a bunch of Utah Mormon assholes) that the ban against gay marriages has been lifted. As well it should’ve been, decades ago.

Often, the question on the non-atheist’s lips is…if you’re not gay, why do you care?

Because it is an essential question. Why? Because this issue cuts to the bone of religious discrimination: the only ‘plausible’ arguments are religious in nature and tone. If one subtracts the option of supernatural divinity from the equation, it becomes a house of cards, collapsing before the light breeze of simple logic.

There are of course, some bozos who are trying to fight it, but the chances are good that their imaginary sky daddy isn’t going to step up, to the plate or to the altar, to help or head this off. Divine intervention is a comic book fantasy, and an unhealthy one at that.

Tip of the glass, tip of the hat, be merry. Salud!

Till the next post, then.

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Abstinence Makes The Church Grow Fondlers: Not Very Funny Anymore…

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis
It’s a small wonder that Pope Ratzi resigned: it seems that pedos in robes are coming out of the woodwork these days…

Police investigate allegations of sex abuse at Catholic boarding school

Police are investigating allegations of abuse at a Catholic boarding school in the Scottish Highlands, following complaints of a brutal regime in which boys were physically beaten, psychologically tortured and sexually assaulted. The school closed in 1993.

Officers from Police Scotland will travel to Newcastle tomorrow to interview Andrew Lavery, 41, who for two years in the 1980s attended the fee-paying Fort Augustus Abbey, which was run by Benedictine monks. "It was systematic, brutal, awful torture," says Lavery, who says he was beaten, sexually assaulted and isolated in a locked room for days on end under "special measures". He added: "The psychological torture was the most damaging. In the end I wanted to kill myself."

Lavery claims he was beaten unconscious by a monk and lay master while pupils watched, then left at the playing fields to crawl back to school. He also says he experienced "greying", which involved other pupils pinning the victim's legs apart while his testicles were hit with a hockey stick. A monk watched without intervening. "I have had pain in my left testicle all my life," he said.

There’s more at the link provided, if you have the stomach for it.

This is an ongoing issue. I don’t need to cite cases to prove that anymore. Res ipsa loquitur.

This illness we call religion blinds the eye to reality: it destroys self esteem and turns narcissists into sexual predators. It claims we need to return to a state of purity that never existed, deifying that state and holding it up as some sort of goal. And when that state that the worshipper never achieves goes unfulfilled, it seems to create some sort of frisson that builds unless released.

Religion is a constant state of perversion. It deals in delusion. It panders to the self-loather, and imposes unnatural controls on the psyche. And when the imposed inhibitions become too much to contain, the dam breaks, and the madness of repression spills forth.

This madness needs to end, else it may end us.

Till the next post, then.

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St. Patrick’s Day–Yet Another Senseless Holiday

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis

Tomorrow bein’ the only truly Irish holiday there be, tis time to do our livers some serious damage!

But seriously folks: a holiday commemorating a guy who chased non-existent serpents out of Ireland?  Really?

It actually commemorates the arrival of Christianity in the Emerald Isle – why, the very thought of that makes me Irish soide want to down as much whiskey as is humanly possible, so as I can perish the thought.

And as history shows, the Holy Cee has done some sorry arse garbage while they had their grubby paws into the mix:

Catholic Church enslaved 30,000 Irish women as forced unpaid labor in Magdalene Laundries until 1996

What a horrific story.  The Irish Prime Minister gave a partial apology today for the government’s role in a 74-year scandal in which, a new official government report says, over 10,000 women were forced to work without pay at commercial laundries called Magdalene Laundries, operated by the Catholic Church for “crimes” as small as not paying a train ticket.

Wikipedia notes that the estimate of the number of women who were used as forced slave labor by the Catholic Church in Ireland alone goes as high as 30,000 over the entire time the Magdalene laundries were in operation.

Read the entire article. It’s enough to curl the toe hairs. Sickening. The Catholic Church should make reparations for each person abused so horrifically – and that would bankrupt the pedophiliac slaver mongers.

I know that curses are manure, but here’s one I wish I could wish upon the bleedin’ papists:

May you find the bees but not the honey.

Sláinte!

Till the next post then.

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More On The Madness Of Muslim: Misogynistic Mentalities

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis
There is perhaps no more sharper criticism of any culture, than how a woman is treated in that culture. It speaks to the inequality of the sexes when there should be none: it propagates the lie of patriarchy; and it is a cause for weeping.

Maldives girl, 15, sentenced to 100 lashes for 'fornication'

A 15-year-old girl sentenced to 100 lashes for "fornication" on a remote part of the Maldives is at the centre of a new row between moderates and religious conservatives in the Indian Ocean luxury tourist destination.

A court in the tiny island of Feydhoo last week sentenced the girl to a public flogging after she admitted to having sex out of wedlock, court officials have said.

The reportedly consensual sexual relations only came to light during an investigation into the murder of a baby which revealed that the girl had also been repeatedly raped by her stepfather and another man.

Such punishments are relatively commonplace in the Muslim country, visited by more than 750,000 tourists last year but increasingly hit by serious social problems such as gang violence and drug abuse as well as growing political instability.

Though they appear to have initially backed the decision to prosecute the girl, Maldivian authorities are now working with the country's ministry of Islamic affairs and judiciary to cancel or suspend the punishment, a government official said.

Masood Imad, a spokesman for the current president, Mohammed Waheed Hassan, told the Guardian that the government considered her a victim "who should not now become a victim of the law as well".

"The law is there to protect her. It will take its course but we are fully engaged and we have some levers and we are hopeful that she will not be lashed. Let's see who wins the day," Imad said.

Conservatives, however, are calling for the sentence to be carried out.

Recent years have seen tensions between Muslims practising a traditional, relatively tolerant type of Islam and supporters of a more rigorous, puritanical style heavily influenced by that practised in countries such as Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.

It’s that any country in this day and age would even have something as ridiculous as a ‘ministry of Islamic affairs’ or indeed, a ‘ministry’ of any sort as part of the government whatsoever. 

It’s time that these ‘ideologies’ were called for what they truly are: sad twisted anachronistic fantasies that have no place in this century. The bigger problem, is that if you call this out to the parties in question, you’re more likely to be lynched than listened to.

Till the next post, then.

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Sexual Politics And The Papacy: Genitalia Of Despair

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis

And so castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually  - Jimi Hendrix

The Catholic Church is (and always has been) a walking horrorshow of immense proportions. And now that Ratzi the sexual Nazi is stepping down, we find out that there’s always been some sort of trouble in paradise:

Papal resignation linked to inquiry into 'Vatican gay officials', says paper

A potentially explosive report has linked the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI to the discovery of a network of gay prelates in the Vatican, some of whom – the report said – were being blackmailed by outsiders.

The pope's spokesman declined to confirm or deny the report, which was carried by the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica.

The paper said the pope had taken the decision on 17 December that he was going to resign – the day he received a dossier compiled by three cardinals delegated to look into the so-called "Vatileaks" affair.

Last May Pope Benedict's butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested and charged with having stolen and leaked papal correspondence that depicted the Vatican as a seething hotbed of intrigue and infighting.

According to La Repubblica, the dossier comprising "two volumes of almost 300 pages – bound in red" had been consigned to a safe in the papal apartments and would be delivered to the pope's successor upon his election.

The newspaper said the cardinals described a number of factions, including one whose members were "united by sexual orientation".

In an apparent quotation from the report, La Repubblica said some Vatican officials had been subject to "external influence" from laymen with whom they had links of a "worldly nature". The paper said this was a clear reference to blackmail.

It quoted a source "very close to those who wrote [the cardinal's report]" as saying: "Everything revolves around the non-observance of the sixth and seventh commandments."

The seventh enjoins against theft. The sixth forbids adultery, but is linked in Catholic doctrine to the proscribing of homosexual acts.

La Repubblica said the cardinals' report identified a series of meeting places in and around Rome. They included a villa outside the Italian capital, a sauna in a Rome suburb, a beauty parlour in the centre, and a former university residence that was in use by a provincial Italian archbishop.

Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said: "Neither the cardinals' commission nor I will make comments to confirm or deny the things that are said about this matter. Let each one assume his or her own responsibilities. We shall not be following up on the observations that are made about this."

He added that interpretations of the report were creating "a tension that is the opposite of what the pope and the church want" in the approach to the conclave of cardinals that will elect Benedict's successor. Another Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, alluded to the dossier soon after the pope announced his resignation on 11 February, describing its contents as "disturbing".

The three-man commission of inquiry into the Vatileaks affair was headed by a Spanish cardinal, Julián Herranz. He was assisted by Cardinal Salvatore De Giorgi, a former archbishop of Palermo, and the Slovak cardinal Jozef Tomko, who once headed the Vatican's department for missionaries.

Pope Benedict has said he will stand down at the end of this month; the first pope to resign voluntarily since Celestine V more than seven centuries ago. Since announcing his departure he has twice apparently referred to machinations inside the Vatican, saying that divisions "mar the face of the church", and warned against "the temptations of power".

La Repubblica's report was the latest in a string of claims that a gay network exists in the Vatican. In 2007 a senior official was suspended from the congregation, or department, for the priesthood, after he was filmed in a "sting" organised by an Italian television programme while apparently making sexual overtures to a younger man.

In 2010 a chorister was dismissed for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting. A few months later a weekly news magazine used hidden cameras to record priests visiting gay clubs and bars and having sex.

The Vatican does not condemn homosexuals. But it teaches that gay sex is "intrinsically disordered". Pope Benedict has barred sexually active gay men from studying for the priesthood.

That last paragraph is risible. The Vatican doesn’t condemn gays, but gays are ‘intrinsically disordered’? Nice bit of doublespeak there, I’d say.

The raging hypocrisy of this is stupefying.

I’d like to tell these two-faced asshats to go fuck themselves collectively, but I’m betting most of them have tried to do so already.

And so the ‘Holy Cee’ slowly slips into the sea, revealing its irrelevancy….

Till the next post, then.

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Homophobia Gone Mental: Choppity Chop Go The Naughty Bits…

Cross-posted @ the Atheist Oasis

One day when Alfred Hitchcock was still a churchgoing Catholic, he was driving through a Swiss city when he suddenly pointed out of the car window and said, "That is the most frightening sight I have ever seen."

His companion was surprised to see nothing more alarming than a priest in conversation with a little boy, his hand on the child's shoulder.

"Run, little boy," cried Hitchcock, leaning out of the car. "Run for your life!" – Anecdotes

When it comes to truly bizarre horror, few things hold a candle to the religious obsession with genitalia:

Dutch Roman Catholic church 'castrated' boys in 1950s

Up to 11 boys were castrated while in the care of the Dutch Roman Catholic church in the 1950s to rid them of homosexuality, a newspaper investigation has said.

A young man was castrated in 1956 after telling police he was being abused by priests, the newspaper reported.

The justice minister is investigating the role of the government at the time.

Last year, an inquiry found thousands of children had been sexually abused in Dutch Catholic institutions since 1945.

Dutch MPs called for an inquiry after the report was published in the NRC Handelsblad newspaper at the weekend.

'Serious and shocking'

Henk Hethuis, a pupil at a Catholic boarding school, was 18 when he told police in 1956 he was being abused by a Dutch monk. He was castrated on the instructions of Catholic priests, NRC Handelsblad said, and told this would "cure" him of his homosexuality.

The same happened to at least 10 of his schoolmates, the newspaper said.

Hethuis died in a car crash in 1958.

Dutch Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten called the allegations "very serious and shocking" and said he would investigate the role of the Dutch government at the time.

The Dutch Catholic church has said it is willing to co-operate with an investigation to find out whether the media reports are true, Reuters reports.

A commission of inquiry last year said Catholic officials had failed to tackle the widespread abuse at schools, seminaries and orphanages.

The commission - headed by former cabinet minister Wim Deetman - found tens of thousands of children had suffered abuse ranging from inappropriate touching to rape.

It condemned what it called the church's cover-up and culture of silence.

NRC Handelsblad said the commission received a complaint about the alleged castration cases in 2010.

Dutch MPs are to ask formally for a parliamentary hearing with the head of the commission, former cabinet minister Wim Deetman, to ask him why he did not include the information in his report.

The mind boggles. The stomach clenches. The knuckles whiten. There is perhaps no greater violation than that of an innocent child – there are few things more horrific. The mad obsession with purity and virginity combined with the idiocy of celibacy creates monsters.

Till the next post then. 

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Anti-Evolution Screeds–The Frightening Facts Of Denial

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis
Four more states have been added to my list of those I wish would just  fucking secede from the union:

Four US states considering laws that challenge teaching of evolution

Four US states are considering new legislation about teaching science in schools, allowing pupils to to be taught religious versions of how life on earth developed in what critics say would establish a backdoor way of questioning the theory of evolution.

Fresh legislation has been put forward in Colorado, Missouri and Montana. In Oklahoma, there are two bills before the state legislature that include potentially creationist language.

A watchdog group, the National Center for Science Education, said that the proposed laws were framed around the concept of "academic freedom". It argues that religious motives are disguised by the language of encouraging more open debate in school classrooms. However, the areas of the curriculum highlighted in the bills tend to focus on the teaching of evolution or other areas of science that clash with traditionally religious interpretations of the world.

"Taken at face value, they sound innocuous and lovely: critical thinking, debate and analysis. It seems so innocent, so pure. But they chose to question only areas that religious conservatives are uncomfortable with. There is a religious agenda here," said Josh Rosenau, an NCSE program and policy director.

In Oklahoma, one bill has been pre-filed with the state senate and another with the state house. The Senate bill would oblige the state to help teachers "find more effective ways to represent the science curriculum where it addresses scientific controversies". The House bill specifically mentions "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning" as areas that "some teachers are unsure" about teaching.

In Montana, a bill put forward by local social conservative state congressman, Clayton Fiscus, also lists things like "random mutation, natural selection, DNA and fossil discoveries" as controversial topics that need more critical teaching. Meanwhile, in Missouri, a bill introduced in mid-January lists "biological and chemical evolution" as topics that teachers should debate over including looking at the "scientific weaknesses" of the long-established theories.

Finally, in Colorado, which rarely sees a push towards teaching creationism, a bill has been introduced in the state house of representatives that would require teachers to "respectfully explore scientific questions and learn about scientific evidence related to biological and chemical evolution". Observers say the move is the first piece of creationist-linked legislation to be put forward in the state since 1972.

The moves in such a wide range of states have angered advocates of secularism in American official life. "This is just another attempt to bring creationism in through the back door. The only academic freedom they really want to encourage is the freedom to be ignorant," said Rob Boston, senior policy analyst at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Over the past few years, only Tennessee and Louisiana have managed to pass so-called "academic freedom" laws of the kind currently being considered in the four states. Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and close observer of the creationism movement, said that the successes in those two states meant that the religious lobby was always looking for more opportunities.

She said that using arguments over academic freedom was a shift in tactic after attempts to specifically get "intelligent design" taught in schools was defeated in a landmark court case in 2005. Intelligent design, which a local school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, had sought to get accepted as legitimate science, asserts that modern life is too complex to have evolved by chance alone. "Creationists never give up. They never do. The language of these bills may be highly sanitized but it is creationist code," she said.

The laws can have a direct impact on a state. In Louisiana, 78 Nobel laureate scientists have endorsed the repeal of the creationist education law there. The Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology has even launched a boycott of Louisiana and cancelled a scheduled convention in New Orleans. Louisiana native and prominent anti-creationist campaigner in the state Zack Kopplin said that those pushing such bills in other states were risking similar economic damage to their local economies. "It will hurt economic development," Kopplin said.

There is also the impact on students, he added, when they are taught controversies in subjects where the overwhelming majority of scientists have long ago reached consensus agreement. "It really hurts students. It can be embarrassing to be from a state which has become a laughing stock in this area," Kopplin said.

Others experts agreed, arguing that it could even hurt future job prospects for students graduating from those states' public high schools. "The jobs of the future are high tech and science-orientated. These lawmakers are making it harder for some of these kids to get those jobs," said Boston.

Madness. Just madness. We have no better litmus test than likability for the suitability of state office? Nobody would dream of allowing an ‘alien abductee’ to be elected to office, but the down-home corn-pone delusionists seem to be a favorite in states where plausibility is measured by calluses and crimson napes, and the ability to hit a spittoon from yards away.

One of the key-notes in that article: global warming is no longer ‘controversial’ – the fact is, most of these are all non-debates (some put to rest decades ago), and we are seeing the backlash of some serious sour grapes.

This nonsense needs to be shouted down – vigorously and continuously, because making allowances for other people’s ‘feelings’ (which is just PCspeak for ‘validate my stupid beliefs without criticism’) just paves the way for these nutters to try and make more head roads into places they have no business involving themselves.

For a great spoof of this idiocy, here’s a clip, courtesy of the Family Guy.

Enjoy.

Till the next post, then.

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More Homophobia Gone Mental: The Pope Is A Twittering Idiot

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis

Why do we not bomb Rome? Why do we allow these open and declared antagonists of democratic freedom to entertain their Shinto allies and organise a pseudo-Catholic destruction of democratic freedom? Why do we—after all the surprises and treacheries of this war—allow this open preparation of an internal attack upon the rehabilitation of Europe? The answer lies in the deliberate blindness of our Foreign Office and opens up a very serious indictment of the mischievous social disintegration inherent in contemporary Roman Catholic activities. – H. G Wells, Crux Ansata

It seems that one can’t turn around these days without elbowing yet another religious stupidity. And here we have the Papal disgrace carrying on about his homophobia, and even trying to digitize it:

The disgrace of Church backing for Ugandan homophobia

Earlier this month, Pope Benedict XVI joined Twitter in an effort to galvanize the faithful and modernize the Catholic Church for a younger, increasingly secular generation, making him the last person after your grandpa to join the social networking site. The Vatican also hired a former Fox News correspondent to bring their communications strategy into the 21st century, since that network did such an impressive job during the 2012 US presidential election.

The Catholic Church is foundering, and it'll take a lot more than 140 characters and a rightwing "news" hack to put it on a modern track.

The pope is a social issues guy, more interested in themes like "traditional" family values, gay marriage and abortion than, say, helping the poor. And the Vatican is quick to slap down anyone – but especially any women, and particularly women who have the nerve to think of themselves as equal to men – who focuses on helping the most in need, instead of crusading against abortion and gay people. As far as the Church is concerned, advocating for the equal participation of women is "radical feminism" worthy of condemnation; pushing for legislation that kills gay people is worthy of a meeting with a proponent.

Yes, that's correct: just around the same time the pope was drafting his first tweet, he met with Ugandan parliamentary speaker Rebecca Kadaga, who had earlier promised to level the death penalty for gays as a "Christmas present" to the Ugandan people (minus, one assumes, the Ugandans who will be murdered because of their sexual orientation). She was part of a delegation from Uganda which greeted the Pope during a public audience. Ugandan media sources reported that Kadaga had received the pope's "blessing", but this was denied by a Vatican spokesman who insisted the meeting was not a "sign of approval of the actions or proposals of Ms Kadaga".

Uganda has been a target for western evangelicals who see that they're losing the gay marriage battle in their own countries. Religious leaders and rightwing groups, including Rick Warren and the National Organization for Marriage, have gone to Uganda for years to spread anti-gay propaganda and bolster homophobia. These religious leaders position themselves as experts, telling Ugandans that gay people sodomize children, spread Aids, destroy marriage, break up families and pose an imminent threat to society – and then they feign shock when Ugandan leaders decide that the legal punishment most befitting these child-raping, society-crushing individuals is death.

In the meantime, gay, lesbian and transgender Ugandans face vigilante attacks daily, and are routinely raped, beaten, ostracized, tortured and murdered.

The pope – whose own track record on men who sodomize children isn't exactly stellar – meets one of the people whose hateful policies not only provide social cover and justification for that violence but, if enacted, would put state power behind the imprisonment and execution of gay people.

The Church's obsession with policing sexuality is nothing new: in fact, it's a centuries-old Catholic tradition for the Vatican to poke its nose in your bedroom when it feels its power is threatened. The early anti-sex crusades were focused on women – and haven't let up. Women were ordered to serve their husbands and were barred from the priesthood. Abortion was debated in Thomas Aquinas's day – he thought the act was a sin against the marriage, and that, of course, male fetuses were ensouled earlier than female ones – and for a long while, the Church distinguished between early and late-term abortions in terms of punishment.

But as the papal states lost territory to Italy in the late 19th century, the pope came down hard on women, declaring all abortion to be murder. The Church, it seems, is a bit like a schoolyard bully, needing to pick a scapegoat to demonstrate its ultimate authority. Women have spent the past several centuries serving as that target.

The Church extended its reach into the sex lives of its followers (and of women, in particular) again in the 1930s, when it issued its ruling on contraception for the first time ever and deemed birth control incompatible with Catholic teachings on life. Right around that same time, the Church was dealing with what it called the "terrible triangle" of anti-religious and anti-Catholic actions in the Soviet Union, Mexico and Spain. Desperate for a way to show its power and control followers, the Vatican decided that it was wrong to use anything other than crossed fingers to control the number and spacing of your children.

Here's how successful they were: 99% of American women use birth control at some point in their lives, and Catholic women use birth control at the same rates as non-Catholics. In nations where Catholicism is deeply entrenched and abortion is illegal and birth control difficult to access, abortion rates are some of the highest in the world. The only difference is that far more of the procedures are unsafe, and tens of thousands of women die. The lowest abortion rates in the world can be found in the increasingly secular west European countries where the procedure is legal and often covered by state funds, and where birth control is widely accessible.

Realizing it was losing followers and that most women weren't going to comply with the birth control mandate, and recognizing the social upheavals taking place through the 1960s, the Church re-evaluated its position – and doubled down. Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae restated the Church's anti-contraception position, extended it to sterilization and threw in some claims about the natural roles of women and men. (The natural role of celibate men who spend very little time with women is, apparently, to tell all women what to do.)

The Church also took a stand against abortion again, and declared that abortion couldn't even be had in the case of an ectopic pregnancy where the fertilized egg will never develop into a fetus. In the late 1980s, under pressure from the many nuns who have kept the Church functioning for centuries and were pushing for equal rights and recognition, Pope John Paul II asserted that women simply served a "different" role in the Church than men, but one that was equally as important. It was a nice little head-pat to Catholic women, but ultimately a condescending one: does anyone actually believe that there's power in subservience, and that being blocked from all positions of real authority represents equal importance?

In 1995, again facing declining congregations, Pope John Paul II re-upped the Church's hostility toward contraception, and further asserted that condoms were verboten – at the very moment HIV and Aids were ravaging nations around the world. The Church, ironically, categorizes contraception and condoms as part of the "culture of death".

By the Vatican's standards, taking a birth control pill or using a condom is far more deadly than contracting HIV, or executing an actual person for being gay.

As society has progressed, the Church has responded by digging its heels in to maintain outdated, misogynist social norms. And it has long used women's bodies as a tool through which to exercise control in the face of waning influence. Now, gay people are being subjected to the same treatment. As the Church continues to recover from the international pedophilia scandal that its priests perpetrated and the entire institution covered up, and as the world's population increasingly flees from formal religion, the pope is saying that two men or two women falling in love threatens world peace.

A Twitter feed can't modernize an institution so out of touch with reality, with progress and with widely-accepted human rights norms.

If the Church really wants to modernize, it could take a stand for the rights of half the world's population, and give women equal say in the Catholic hierarchy and over basic rights to their own bodies. It could promote condom use to save lives. It could take a good hard look at how its hunger for power and its authoritarianism enabled and covered for sex criminals who targeted vulnerable children.

It could back up out of our bedrooms and quit meddling in national politics, leaving its believers the right to practice as they wish, without imposing its strictures on the rest of us. It could put its enormous resources behind tried-and-true Jesus stuff like helping the sick and indigent, rather than waging battles against nuns who don't hate gays enough.

Better yet, the Catholic Church could do us all a HUGE favor: the Vatican should become fully isolationist, that way all those preening papal pedophiles would be shut off and out of the world. (Sure, I know that ain’t gonna happen, but why not ask for the moon?)

The Holy Cee, in all its anachronistic, primitive glory, is a shame upon our species. It is a blight upon our civilization. It is an institution of little to no worth, a dead albatross weighted around the neck of humanity. Its foundations are laid in blood and bone: it protects the pedophile yet censors the homosexual; for centuries the ill that it has vested human beings outweighs what few good deeds the institution has done. It has repressed women, scarred the psyches of children, dispatched entire armies to take lands and seated men in power based on divine fiat. It has supported any and all things that were ethically wrong yet culturally correct.

The Catholic Church – one of the last bastions of the sewage that is the delusional mind.

It’s gotta go.

Till the next post, then.

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Homophobia Gone Mental: And The Gays DON’T Have It.

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis
More depressing news for the end of the year – it’s more pointy-hatted nonsense:

Pope Benedict signals inter-faith alliance against legalizing gay marriage

The pope’s latest denunciation of gay marriage came in a Christmas address to Vatican officials in which he blended religion, philosophy, anthropology and sociology to illustrate the position of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Vatican has gone on the offensive in response to gains for gay marriage in the United States and Europe, using every possible opportunity to denounce it through papal speeches or editorials in its newspaper or on its radio station.

Throwing the full weight of his office behind a study by France’s chief rabbi on the effects the legalization of gay marriage would have on children and society, he said:

“There is no denying the crisis that threatens it (the family) to its foundations – especially in the Western world.”

The family had to be protected because it was “the authentic setting in which to hand on the blueprint of human existence”, he added.

This is typical Catholic absurdity at its stupidest – note that it was ‘a’ study, not extensive studies, one single study. And boom! It’s a rush off to judgment.

And this is exactly why we need to point and laugh and denounce and shout this nonsense down: there’s no reasoning with the irrational. Courtesy only leads these idiots to think they have a valid point, even when the preponderance of evidence proves otherwise.

Denying a specific subset of the population the right that everyone else has is discrimination: as such, that is distinctly un-American. Marriage is a civil right – saying that two adults can’t do it because somebody’s imaginary friend prohibits it is forcing religious belief on others – a clear violation of SOCAS.

It’s too bad that gay couples in America can’t file a class-action suit against that pointy-hatted assclown in the Vatican. Or any of the other flatline idiots who try to foist their madness onto the rest of us.

Ex cathedra my homesick ass.

Till the next post, then.

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More On The Misogyny Of Muslim–It’s 2 PM, Do You Know Where Your Chattel Is?

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis
It seems that these days, all one has to do is turn around, to find some disgusting fact about this alleged ‘religion of peace’. In this case, it’s Muslim equivalent of Wild Kingdom. Only in this case, we’re not talking about wild animals, but people

Saudi Arabia implements electronic tracking system to monitor women’s movements

In a country where women are denied the right to vote, are not allowed to drive, and are basically treated like children, Saudi Arabia has taken its next giant leap backwards by rolling out an SMS electronic tracking system that alerts male "guardians" by text message whenever women under their protection leave the country. The development has been met with outrage by reformers, who have turned to Twitter to voice their concern.

Saudi Arabia is a complete mess as far as women's rights is concerned. It ranks 130th out of 134 countries for gender equality — a nation where only 16.5% of women make up the workforce. As devout followers of Sharia Law, all women, regardless of age, require a male guardian and cannot leave the country without written consent.

And now, judging by a flurry of incoming accounts, it's clear that the country has covertly implemented a new system that will further serve to strengthen its control over women.

It all started last week when a Saudi man travelling with his wife began to get text messages on his phone from the immigration authorities alerting him to the fact that his wife had left the international airport in Riyadh (she was listed as a dependent on his national identity card). Concerned, he contacted Manal al-Sherif, a women's rights campaigner in Saudi Arabia, who then broadcast the news over Twitter.

For insanity and double-standards, all you need to do is look at religion. Especially Islam, where women are considered little more than chattel – because of course, no one would ever consider doing this sort of thing to a man.

And of course, the rationalizations come pouring in:

And as it turned out, the text messages weren't an isolated case. Similar accounts started to pour in, strongly suggesting that a new system had been rolled-out without so much as a peep from the Saudi authorities. It now appears that every guardian whose dependent has a passport is receiving a text after cross border crossings.

In response, the Ministry of the Interior has denied the allegations, saying it's not intended to connect women with their guardians. And according to the Riyadh Bureau, the system has been in place since 2010, but now the service works without having to register with the ministry. It claims that the system is part of a larger e-Government plan to use technology in order to facilitate access to its services — such as electronic travel permits (thus replacing the need for "yellow slips").

Pathetic. Women being treated as second-class citizens in any 21st century nation is an outrage, and should be criticized and denounced regardless of culture or heritage. Gender rights are one of those bridges we need to build, even at the cost of destroying anachronistic traditions.

Whenever any ideology proposes that some people should be discriminated against simply because they were born differently, that ideology needs to go. And if necessary, the hard way.

Till the next post, then.

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