Tom Cruise puts the ethos of Scientology into layman’s terms. If you haven’t seen this video, drop what you’re doing, watch it, and then donate $5,000 to L. Ron right now!!!

Leading Church Bodies, 2000

This map shows the dominance of churches by county in 2000. It is a map of only churches. The study did not look at other religions or the non-religious. That said, it’s pretty interesting. Click for larger view.

Huckabee is more fucked up than i thought

wow. wow. holy shit man. Mike (F)Huckabee says we should amend the constitution to fit with “god’s standards”. What is he talking about!? This guy should go to one of those fundamentalist countries where they tolerate religious doctrine as government law. Not in my country, bitch!

Im not sure who’s preferable, the phony mormon dumb-ass Romney, or the religious nut job douche-nozzle Huckabee. God i hope McCain lays the smack down on both of them.

Live free or die!

Christmas-topher Hitchens

Hitchens is his usual entertaining self during this interview about the holiday season, featured on The Onion AV Club’s website:

http://www.avclub.com/content/interview/christmas_with_christopher

Lots of great moments in this conversation, but here’s my favorite:

I don’t have someone permanently telling me, you know, that it’s the season to be jolly. And I don’t have to hear music that really isn’t music at all, like “Jingle Bell Rock,” blasted as if one lived in a state that allowed no alternative. Yes, actually, there are constant reminders of the Dear Leader and the Great Leader, all the fucking time. Plus, another thing I don’t like: celebrations of virginity. If asked my opinion about virginity, I would say, “I’m opposed to it.” I don’t think it deserves to be celebrated, at any rate. Or at least, if I’m not opposed, I’m very highly skeptical and critical of it.

The “Bah, Hanukkah” article to which the interviewer refers can be found here:

http://www.slate.com/id/2179045/

Have a holly jolly holiday!

Religion in Government

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to a lecture series on European History in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each lecture focuses on the life of some monumental figure during this time period, from monarchs (Catherine the Great) and military leaders (Napoleon), to composers (Wagner) and writers (Samuel Johnson).

Anyway, I was listening to the lecture on Queen Victoria this morning, and the professor prefaced her biography with an explanation of the religious element in Victorian politics. In 19th century England, Jews could not hold positions in Parliament or receive government appointments. This rankled the chops of a Parliamentary Whig named Thomas Babington Macaulay who implored his colleagues to eradicate this prohibition in a famous speech. The professor quoted a portion of his speech, and it made me think a lot about Mitt Romney, the current president, and the collective amnesia of Americans when it comes to the separation of church and state. I’ve had conversations with a few dedicated Christians who don’t understand why a secular government is important. I think Sir Babington sums it up nicely below:

We hear of essentially Protestant governments and essentially Christian governments, words which mean just as much as essentially Protestant cookery, or essentially Christian horsemanship. Government exists for the purpose of keeping the peace, for the purpose of compelling us to settle our disputes by arbitration instead of settling them by blows, for the purpose of compelling us to supply our wants by industry instead of supplying them by rapine. This is the only operation for which the machinery of government is peculiarly adapted, the only operation which wise governments ever propose to themselves as their chief object. If there is any class of people who are not interested, or who do not think themselves interested, in the security of property and the maintenance of order, that class ought to have no share of the powers which exist for the purpose of securing property and maintaining order. But why a man should be less fit to exercise those powers because he wears a beard, because he does not eat ham, because he goes to the synagogue on Saturdays instead of going to the church on Sundays, we cannot conceive. The points of difference between Christianity and Judaism have very much to do with a man’s fitness to be a bishop or a Rabbi. But they have no more to do with his fitness to be a magistrate, a legislator, or a minister of finance, than with his fitness to be a cobbler. Nobody has ever thought of compelling cobblers to make any declaration on the true faith of a Christian. Any man would rather have his shoes mended by a heretical cobbler than by a person who had subscribed all the thirty-nine articles, but had never handled an awl. Men act thus, not because they are indifferent to religion, but because they do not see what religion has to do with the mending of their shoes. Yet religion has as much to do with the mending of shoes as with the budget and the army estimates. We have surely had several signal proofs within the last twenty years that a very good Christian may be a very bad Chancellor of the Exchequer.

I don’t know if you can consider George W. Bush a “good Christian”, but the irony of that ending sentence certainly doesn’t escape me.

The full speech can be found here.

‘Tis the Season to be…an Atheist?!

Breaking news at this hour! A con-tra-va-see!

Did you know that atheists are trying to infiltrate the holiday season by indoctrinating our Christian youth?

How, you ask? Through the guise of a fantasy holiday movie entitled The Golden Compass. The film has been adapted from a book, which was part of a children’s series entitled His Dark Materials. The author of the series, Philip Pullman, is an atheist who wrote the books in order to construct a sort of counter narrative to C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. It has some unflattering metaphorical representations of the Church and shares the vision and values of nonbelief to
children.

When the studio adapted The Golden Compass to film, it removed or whitewashed all of those critical elements, rendering the original storyline completely unrecognizable. So why are the demagogues and Christian watch groups frothing at the bit over the film’s release if its anti-religious elements have been abandoned?

Bill Donohue said that while the film itself isn’t objectionable, it could encourage the children who go to see it to read the series, which would denigrate Christianity and promote atheism for kids. As a result, he and his band of monkeys in the Catholic League have organized mass boycotts of the film. It’s a very reasonable position: Other people do not have the right to posit an opinion, narrative, fantasy tale, or any other sort of expression that directly dissents with the opinions that Bill Donohue holds. I’m not sure if you were aware of this, reader, but Bill Donohue is actually God in disguise.

Pullman’s response:

“It causes me to shake my head in sorrow that such nitwits could be loose in the world.”

Some more thoughts on Mitt’s religious bullshit…

Not to be coarse, and I do not want to alienate anyone, but Billo tries to make this woman look like her viewpoint isn’t valid or historically accurate, and it is both valid and historically accurate…
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Mitt’s Speech…

Here is the full speech he gave about his faith and “Faith in America”…
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And, because I love Hitch and despise Mitt, here’s some of Hitchen’s response to this speech…

Romney does not understand the difference between deism and theism, nor does he know the first thing about the founding of the United States. Jefferson’s Declaration may invoke a “Creator,” but, as he went on to show in the battle over the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, he and most of his peers did not believe in a god who intervened in human affairs or in a god who had sent a son for a human sacrifice. These easily ascertainable facts are reflected in the way that the U.S. Constitution does not make any mention of a superintendent deity and in the way that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention declined an offer (possibly sarcastic), even from Benjamin Franklin, that they resort to prayer to compose their differences. Romney may throw a big chest and say that God should be “on our currency, in our pledge,” and of course on our public land in this magic holiday season, but James Madison did not think that there should be chaplains opening the proceedings of Congress or even appointed as ministers in the U.S. armed forces. Trying to dodge around this, and to support his assertion that the founders were religious in the Christian sense, Romney drones on about a barely relevant moment of emotion in 1774 and comes up with the glib slogan that “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Any fool can think of an example where freedom exists without religion—and even more easily of an instance where religion exists without (or in negation of) freedom.
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According to the admittedly very contradictory scriptures of the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth warned his disciples and followers that they should expect to be ridiculed and mocked for their faith. After all, how likely was it that God had decided to reveal himself to only a few illiterate peasants in a barbarous backwater? Those who elected to believe this stuff were quite rightly told to expect a hard time, and the expression “fool for God” or “fool for Christ” has been with us ever since. That concept has some dignity and nobility. Entirely lacking in dignity or nobility (or average integrity) is the well-heeled son of a gold-plated church who wants to assume the pained look of martyrdom only when he is asked if he actually believes what he says. A long time ago, Romney took the decision to be a fool for Joseph Smith, a convicted fraud and serial practitioner of statutory rape who at times made war on the United States and whose cult has been made to amend itself several times in order to be considered American at all. We do not require pious lectures on the American founding from such a man, and we are still waiting for some straight answers from him.

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