Some Shroud presentation notes

Earlier this week I had a pretty long post on The BEAST about a Shroud of Turin presentation I attended. Some of the details didn’t really fit with how I wanted to write the story, so I thought I’d add them here. This isn’t an admission of hiding facts which would have contradicted what I had to say about Russ Breault’s presentation. These are neutral omissions that just would have made the article too sprawling and rambling. Still they’re kind of interesting and I thought I should get them down somewhere and this is kind of the place for me for that sort of thing. So here we go:

The church this was held at had two flags on either side of its altar. One was a US flag and the other was a “Christian flag.” Now these are used by lots of Christian organizations, but they’re all pretty creepy. Here is is outside of the HQ of Focus on the Family:

And here it is at a Ku Klux Klan HQ:

There were ushers, but they didn’t… erm.. ush anyone. They just stood by the exits. One man was going to the bathroom towards the end of the event and an usher approached him and asked if he was leaving. I don’t know why, but it seemed ominous. Maybe that’s just my own paranoia though.

If Joe Nickell were there, he didn’t ask a question afterwards. I saw one person raising his hand after the Q&A ended, but I kind of doubt that was him since he’d have known to try to get his question out there quickly. Breault mentioned beforehand that his Q&A would have to be brief.

The pastor of the church’s name is Andrew Abraham. He shook my hand and told me God blessed me. He didn’t seem like an asshole.

Breault said that we were living in an age of skepticism. People seem to just lap that stuff up. I wish as many people showed up at skeptics’ conventions as they do to church on Sundays.

At one point Breault brought up a slide of the Pope holding that incense thing they use before Mass. Like a teacher in a classroom he said something like “And this represents… what?” and there was this really awkward pause because this is at a Protestant church and they wouldn’t be expected to know these things, apparently. A few people did and spoke up eventually.

One of Breault’s defenses against the Carbon-dating of the Shroud was that the scientists took a sample of it at a point where it had been handled. This is illustrated in the pic I have on The BEAST article where some Bishops are holding it. Breault used similar images to make this point. Then he made a few jokes about how scientists are stupid for choosing that sample. But during the Q&A it came to light that the scientists were following the Church’s protocol, since they owned the thing after all. Breault admitted this, therefore admitting that he was knowingly deceiving the audience by making it seem like this “error” – at least it was an error as he saw it – was the fault of the scientists and not the Church. I would speculate that the Church wanted to sample a part of the shroud which could be questionable so that they could always fall back on an excuse like the one Breault used to make it seem like it is at worst, still a mystery.

There were around 150 people there. Most of the pews were full. There were very few people under 40. I only saw one couple with children. I sat in the back corner in a ‘reserved’ section, but nobody seemed to care. They had water but nobody took any. It took place at 107 Smith Street in Tonawanda, NY, which is Immanuel Lutheran Church.

Breault was selling DVDs. He mentioned them once at the end, but didn’t cite them during the talk which would have been really annoying.

OK, that’s about it. Hopefully I’ll update this blog more often, but then again I always say that.

TWiC 3: School’s Out (Of Their Minds)

So this column’s going back to the multi-topic format, and we’ve got a school-related theme this week. It’s funny how I started this thinking it would force me to write within a certain formula only to tweak it for each of the first three.

Please don’t sue.

There’s some good news in England, where they’ve stopped publicly funding schools which teach creationism as science. That link’s from The Guardian and usually they do a good job but the headline (“Richard Dawkins celebrates a victory over creationists”) sucks. It’s not just Richard Dawkins who wins in this, it’s all of us. Even people who don’t like Dawkins benefit from not having to pay teachers to indoctrinate students with nonsense.

It’s kind of interesting that the UK was able to do this without having a separation of church and state. Here in the US, advocates of science have depended largely on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to keep creationism out of science classes. In cases like Edwards. v. Aguilard, those who argued for teaching science in science classes only had to demonstrate that what creationists were proposing amounted to a government establishment of religion.

Creationists have responded by re-branding their creationism “Intelligent Design,” which differs from creationism only in that they claim that the intelligent designer they propose doesn’t necessarily have to be a supernatural god. It could be aliens, for example. Unfortunately for them, the defenders of science have found the transitional fossils which prove ID is nothing but a cover for the same old biblical literalism which US courts have already rejected.

Where the History Channel and the Discovery Institute converge.

Even if the creationists were sincere in their claims about aliens, it’d still be pseudoscience for pretty much the same reasons a God-based creationism is pseudoscience. So it’s nice to see that if for some reason it became necessary to fight against that brand of nonsense here in America without using the separation of church and state, we could. It’d be like beating up a 86 year old with one hand tied behind your back – a little more challenging than usual, but still fairly easy and lots of fun, too.

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Meanwhile, here on our side of the Atlantic some principal is being accused of hypnotizing his students and programming them to do some creepy shit. One student killed himself the day after the principal hypnotized him. Unlicensed practice of hypnosis is a crime in Florida (where else would this happen?) and this guy is facing up to a year in prison.

One hypnosis victim (left) went on a brutal path of vengeance to find the dickshit who imprisoned him.

Someone is crazy here, but I’m not sure who. Either the parents are using the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy in order to insinuate that the hypnosis caused the suicide, or he really did program the kid to kill himself. It sucks, but students do kill themselves all the time without having anything to do with hypnosis. And it looks like this principal was pretty excited about hypnosis, so it’s not too unusual that among all the students he hypnotized, one of them would be suicidal for unrelated reasons.

But at the same time, remember being a kid in school and how powerful and mysterious the principal of the school seemed to be? What if the possibility of the principal having the power to control your mind were thrown into the mix? That’d be terrifying. Kids would be afraid to even pass a note in class or throw a paper airplane because if they got caught, they might get sent to the principal’s office where he would program you to piss your pants whenever your teacher told the class to open your Math textbooks. So even though it’s probably not possible to use hypnosis to influence someone to kill themself, you can see why the parents would be a little upset.

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Just when the British are finally getting their shit together and rejecting pseudoscience from their classrooms, we here in the States are going to be teaching more of it to our kids. It’s like they say: When God closes a door for creationists, he opens a window for anthropogenic global warming deniers.

But the Brits are supposed to be the backwards ones here. They’re the ones with a monarchy. They’re the ones with an official state religion. They’re the ones threatening students with expulsion for posting internet comics mocking Islam. They’re the ones calling a snack “tea.” They’re the fuckers who gave us terrible people with the first name Andrew like Wakefield and Sullivan. We should be miles – yeah, miles – ahead of them in this department. But instead here we are in 2012 with a small group of cranks monitoring our classrooms to make sure science teachers aren’t being too dismissive of their ideology-driven beliefs about global climate change.

The only cool thing to come out of England since 1066

We should all be sickened by this. It’s one thing for people to grow attached to goofy ideas after they’ve reached adulthood, but it’s something else altogether to indoctrinate students with those same goofy ideas in the very institution which is supposed to give them the mental tools they need to defend themselves against them.

Fortunately the National Center for Science Education is on the case. They’ve hired staff tasked specifically with fighting this ugly trend in politicizing science in public schools. Previously the NCSE mostly dealt with creationism, so this new development is kind of a big deal for them.

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One last thing, and if you regularly read atheist/freethought news outlets you’ve probably already heard about this. A high school student named Jessica Ahlquist successfully sued in order to get a prayer banner removed from her Cranston, RI school cafeteria. Cranston is of course the city best known for portraying the role of Walter White on the TV show Breaking Bad.

So of course when a 16 year old girl wins a fight against people with little to no understanding of how the law in America works, you know what comes next: Christian threats! Here are some of the classier ones:

“I think everyone should just fight this girl”

“what a little bitch lol i wanna snuff her”

“lol i wanna stick that bitch lol”

“Brb ima go drown that atheist in holy water”

And to make it even worse, even someone supposedly on “our side” decided to be a big jerk about it to whine about how he feels victimized by women on twitter:

@jennifurret @jessicaahlquist I would definitely support you on this but far to many Females use their being a victim as a weapon again Men.

I’d call him a pussy for being so offended by feminism, but that’d probably defeat the point.So I’ll just follow Dan Savage’s advice and call him a scrotum.

Politicians in Rhode Island are piling on Ahlquist, too. Some piece of slime / Democrat (but I repeat myself) named Peter Palumbo called her an “evil little thing” on some ham radio show. A state Senator/caps-lock enthusiast named Beth Moura  called her an “ACLU sweetheart.” Based on the context and the fact that she’s a Republican, Moura presumably thinks that defending the Constitution and civil liberties is a horrible thing. But with any luck, these cheap shots at a teenage girl who’s smarter than both of them put together will be the closest either of these losers get to any kind of fame or power.

The American history and early American lit geeks among us probably know Rhode Island as one of the first states with a strict separation of church and state. The guy who basically founded it, Roger Williams, was a preacher who was pretty adamant about keeping religion and politics separate. It’s worth remembering that while doubters of religion tend to be the ones who are most outspoken about defending the Establishment Clause, those values really are in the interest of the religious believers. One thing religions are good at is forming schisms, and who’s to say your’s is going to be in the majority forever? Keeping the government secular protects those with religion just as much as it does those of us without.

Anyway, this story has a happy ending because it looks like Ahlquist will be less massively in debt after college than most other students her age. Her supporters set up a scholarship fund for her which as I’m writing this has collected over 22K$ for Ahlquist’s college education. Chip in if you can.

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So that’s all I’ve got for this week, kids. Hopefully you read this column on your iPhone during a boring class. Back in my day we didn’t have cell phones in school. Most adults didn’t even have cell phones. Some of us had pagers, and we had to come up with these weird codes to tell each other things using only numbers. And if you wanted a call back, you had to be at a place with an old fogey land line phone. And if we wanted to see a movie and missed it in the theaters, we had to wait until it came out on VHS. Do you even know what VHS is? Nevermind, just get off my lawn, my back hurts, tell me how to get to the shuffleboard court, my maid is stealing from me, etc.

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In Which We Jump On the Tebow-Bashing Bandwagon

There are lots of numbers associated with football games. But what do they mean?

A lot was made of Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow throwing for 316 yard in last week’s footsball game against the terminally unemployed steel-workers of Pittsburgh. You see, Tebow stood out from other quarterbacks for painting Bible verses on his face, a favorite of his being John 3:16. People imagined there was some connection between the number of yards Tebow threw for and the placement of one of the more important verses in Christianity within one of the later Gospels.

It’s a pretty clear example of selection bias. When something unusual happens which seems to validate a wacky but popular belief, that will stand out in the memories of people holding that belief. We remember the hits and forget the misses. It’s what psychics and astrologers depend on to keep customers. And now this weird sub-section of the divination industry is combining sports, numerology and religion, so I’m going to cash in on it like the rest.

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Last night the Tea Party Patriots of New England beat Tim Tebow and the Broncos by a score of 45-10. I couldn’t find any relevant verses in the Bible. So unsurprisingly I had to turn to the Quran. Here is 45:10 from the Quran:

Before them is Hell, and what they had earned will not avail them at all nor what they had taken besides Allah as allies. And they will have a great punishment.

So it’s pretty clear what Mohammed’s referring to here. Hell obviously symbolizes the Patriots losing to the Broncos. In endorsing Jesus, Tebow had “taken besides Allah as allies.” And this blog post mocking Tebow and his fans is the great punishment predicted by the Prophet Mohammed under the divine guidance of the arch-angel Gabriel.

“GO PATS!”

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Now to dig a little deeper, I’m going to be using the King James Version of NFL statistics and the ESPN reports of the Bible. This is where this kind of work gets fun because there are about as many sports statistics in a game as there are verses in the various alleged holy books. So I can pretty much make the “meaning” of this NFL playoff game be whatever I want.

Tebow completed 9 passes out of 26 attempts. The ninth chapter of Mark in part tells the story of Jesus casting a demon out of a young boy. Here’s Mark 9:26

And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him: and he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead.

Right after this, Jesus takes the boy’s hand and he regains consciousness. So the 26th verse of Mark 9 refers to the low point of the “boy,” i.e. Tebow, just before Jesus fully heals him. So now all Tim Tebow has to do is to have a game where he plays even shittier than he did last night and only completes 9 passes out of 27 attempts, and he’ll be back to how he was before the demon of losing in the playoffs took control of him.

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Patriots QB Tom Brady’s longest completed pass of the game was for 61 yards. And is it just a coincidence that there is such a verse as Exodus 6:1? I DOUBT IT.

Then the LORD said unto Moses, Now shalt thou see what I will do to Pharaoh: for with a strong hand shall he let them go, and with a strong hand shall he drive them out of his land.

Here the God character is a metaphor for the INS. The government is telling Moses (Brady) that soon it will crack down on Pharaoh (Tim Tebow) for being an illegal immigrant. As he admitted in that horrible anti-abortion commercial which ran during the Super Bowl, Tebow was “born” in the Philippines. Well, all his documentation is apparently faked, according to my haphazard and irresponsible numerological interpretation of the theological meaning of Tom Brady’s football stats. Remember, you heard it here first.

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Since last night’s game was one of those playoff games where the losers are banned from playing any more games and from talking or thinking about footsball for the rest of the season, this marks the end of playing football games for money for the Broncos until next fall. So we have the complete stats for the Broncos for this season.

Tebow was sacked 33 times this season. And after this disappointing loss for him, he’s gotta feel a little like Job wondering why God could let all these horrible things happen to him, like losing a game he’s paid millions of dollars to play regardless of the outcome. Job 33 is a speech by this young guy named Elihu, who tries to answer Job/Tebow’s whining and bitching. Elihu’s unsatisfied with the counter-arguments made by Job’s buddies, so he busts up the pity party to give them what he sees as the real explanation.

Job, seen here defying God by fixing his television antenna.

Elihu’s speech in Job 33 is basically a foreshadowing of the response the God character gives Job, which is that God is powerful and Job shouldn’t even question him. Shut up Job, you bozo. I MADE you from dirt. Get lost. I work in mysterious ways. That’s what God tells Job ultimately.

And it’s also what we hear from apologists trying to respond to the Problem of Evil. God gets all the credit when things are going well, but when something horrible happens like a flood or earthquake or a Broncos playoff loss, suddenly it’s all “mysterious ways.” When scientists cure polio, the devout thank God. But when a tsunami kills a few thousand people they suddenly embrace a naturalistic worldview where randomness instead of God is at the root of all things.

I’d like that kind of gig – one where all your fuck-ups are always overlooked and you get all the credit for the good stuff others do. It’s nice work if you can get it.

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TWiC #2: Jay-Z and Beyonce’s demon baby will enslave us all

[I meant to write about a few different subjects this week, but got a little carried away with one in particular.]

You’ve probably heard from your jackass co-workers who read the tabloids that Beyonce gave birth to a human child this past week. But were you aware that this baby will one day reduce the human population of Earth to 500 million by instigating wars and spraying poison gas from commercial airplanes? IT IS TRUE.

Jay-Z, left, seen here warming Beyonce up to the idea of the pidder padder of little Antichrist feet. 

First, some background: There have been rumors going back a while that Jay-Z is a member of the Illuminati. The Illuminati actually existed back in the 18th century. It was this group of intellectuals who worked in secret to try to undermine the theocratic monarchies which had been so popular around the world for the past several centuries and replace them with the liberal democracies we enjoy today. Eventually the Illuminati became popular to the point where it could no longer operate in secret and disbanded. Today this is known as the Operation Ivy Effect.

Around this time, America was growing up as the first modern secular republic with its own wars, pubic hair, slaves, lack of confidence around girls, wholesale slaughters of the indigenous populations and all that jazz. So the people who might have joined the Illuminati in times past didn’t have to sneak around in the shadows to talk about why they thought secular values were better than following the divine right of kings. If being able to speak your mind openly in public without too much fear of being burned alive for heresy is winning, then the Illuminati had “won.”

If you take a map of Washington, DC, you can like draw lines through it and stuff.

But the fundamentalist Christians wouldn’t let it go. They had to keep believing that the Illuminati was still out to get them, somehow. So they projected their fear and hatred onto other groups. Freemasons, Catholics, Jesuits, Jews – they were all supposedly new hideouts for the old Illuminati who’s bent on global depopulation so they can control the world. This isn’t the root of all of the kookier conspiracy theories, but it is for a hell of a lot of them.

I’m not really clear on why Jay-Z became the target of the fundamentalists on the grounds that he’s a part of this “New World Order” conspiracy. They seem to think he uses Illuminati symbolism in his music, but that just raises the question of why a secret global takeover conspiracy would risk the cover they’ve supposedly used for the past few centuries just to put some of their symbols on a Jay-Z album. What’s the point of doing that?

I’ve noticed this kind of innuendo in conspiracy-mongering a lot before. The Beatles put backwards messages on Strawberry Fields Forever to tell fans that Paul McCartney is dead. There are messages on the dollar bill. Hollywood used 911 in movies and television because they all knew the government would blow up the World Trade Center buildings on September 11. It’s all absurd on its face, and if they get anywhere near a coherent reason for why they believe the conspirators publicly displayed their plans in this subliminal way, it never makes any fucking sense at all. It’s weird that the conspiracy subculture which thrives so much on narrative can’t seem to come up with a consistent, entertaining story to really explain the reasons for the “symbolism” which only they see.

And it’s no wonder only they see this symbolism. They’re the only ones who want it to be there so badly that they actually try to force it into existence by force of sheer will. Let’s go back to that Jay-Z album cover that put him on the anti-Illuminati types’ blacklist:

I mean, sure, gold is tacky. But demonic? I don’t think I’d go that far. It has some interesting detail in it, but it’s not what I would choose for cover art if I were making an album.

A blogger I picked at random sets me straight and explains some of the symbolism:

Triangles- These are designed as an inner frame in clusters around the album. Triangles are known symbols of the pyramid in the illuminati.

OH GOD NO NOT TRIANGLES! ANYTHING BUT TRIANGLES!

Baphomet- There are four huge symbols of the baphomet in the middle of all four walls of the album. The baphomet is a pagan deity symbol for the occult and satanism.

Here’s Baphomet:

Admittedly I kind of suck when it comes to aesthetics. But I really have no clue what this person is talking about with four Baphomets in the album cover. I see stuff in the places the blogger’s referring to, but I don’t see any goat heads. Later they misidentify tilted stars as “Pentagrams… Very known mason symbols.” They make such stretches in this way that it’s difficult to believe they’re perceiving these “symbols” for any reason other than that they simply want them to be there.

But the best part is in the update:

UPDATE: July 6, 2011- The album cover is ornate solid gold designed by Givenchy creative director Riccardo Tisci who is the same guy who designed the infamous Jesus is Lord T-shirts that the hip hip artists wear in order to deceive their fans. But it’s obvious whom they serve by this album cover.

That’s right, don’t be fooled, people! You saw the triangles, didn’t you? And the goats? No? Well, you saw the triangles, right? So… yeah! TRIANGLES OMGWTF.

To put the joking aside for a minute, this is how conspiracy believers inoculate themselves from disproof. Any evidence against them must itself be part of the conspiracy. If it turns out the guy who made the ‘Satanic’ album cover is a Christian, then his identity as a Christian is just a cover so he can deceive other Christians. If NIST finds that WTC Building 7 collapsed due to damage from debris and the fires that ensued instead of a controlled demolition, that just proves NIST was in on the 9/11 conspiracy. If some yokels call a press conference to show off their fake Bigfoot corpse and get called out on it, then they must have been part of a government plot to discredit cryptozoology.

Someone’s probably already made this connection before without my seeing it, but all this is a lot like the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s where people got whipped up into such a hysterical fear of Satanic cults kidnapping and murdering children that they started to smear some of the heavy metal and punk bands of the era as stealth Satanists. The only real differences are that this version hasn’t reached the scale of the 1980s one, and Jay-Z doesn’t seem to be adopting an over-the-top Satanic persona to mock his nutty critics while appealing to suburban teenagers who think upside down crosses are cool.

Maybe the non-reaction to the irrational fear of non-fundamentalist Christian rappers is enabling it. Maybe that’s why people feel comfortable with literally demonizing an infant.

Beyonce, seen here performing her hit single All The Single Ladies Must Bow Down Before Baphomet (Or Be Executed By The United Nations Military In A FEMA Internment Camp)

And then you’ve got the ridiculous excuses everyone in that last link parrots: That Ivy Blue means Illuminati’s Very Youngest / Born Living Under Evil. For starters, unless the Rap/R&B division of the Illuminati has developed a reverse aging potion, Ivy isn’t going to be the youngest member of the shady imaginary cabal for very long. Also, Eulb Yvi isn’t Latin for “Lucifer’s Daughter,” or anything else for that matter. It doesn’t mean anything in Latin. Some asshole behind a pulpit just made that up and people without critical thinking skills repeated it because believing it was true made them feel good.

Lastly, so what if they were Satanic members of a secret society bent on destroying theocracy? Satanism’s kind of silly in my opinion, but if the fight’s between secularists and theocrats, I don’t really need to take long to decide which side I’m on.

So to re-cap: The Illuminati doesn’t exist anymore except in the minds of hateful and gullible people who want an enemy. And even if they did, they’d pretty much be the good guys. Also, Jay-Z should start trolling the fuck out of these people by rapping about gun control, providing free abortion and sterilization services at his concerts, and hanging out with anyone named Rothschild. The worst case scenario is that the attempt to embarrass the conspiracy people into re-examining their beliefs backfires, but then Alex Jones has that on-air heart attack we all know is coming while talking about it. And that’s good enough.

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This Week In Crackpottery #1: Witch Hunts, Psychics, AGW Deniers, & Hindu Nationalists

So I had originally thought of calling this regular column This Week In Fucked Up Religious Shit, but a few problems came to mind. For one thing, there are lots of non-religious infuriating, hilarious, or otherwise crazy shit I would have to ignore: psychics, alternative medicine, fringe politics, conspiracy theories, North Korea, and a lot more. Also, I’d eventually collide with the problem of trying to delineate between what does and does not qualify as a religion, which can be tricky at times. I’d rather leave that problem to the IRS.

Anyway, I’m going to try to regularly write about some of the craziest shit that happens throughout the week. When I’m feeling more patient, I’ll try to actually explain how people’s thinking has gone wrong and how we can actually know that, but there will be plenty of mockery too. Sometimes that’s the most appropriate response.

So let’s get to it:

Notorious Nigerian witch-hunter to preach in the US

If you thought religious trolls in America were bad you can take some comfort in that you don’t live in Nigeria, where actual witch hunts are still taking place. I don’t mean some kind of Arthur Miller metaphor for an irrational hysterical atmosphere of false confessions prompted by accusations based on conjecture and hearsay; I mean the HEY LOOK DELMAR THERE’S A WITCH LET’S DONE KILL IT kind of witch hunt.

The good news is that even Houston, Texas doesn’t have a local expert in witch hunting. The bad news is that they’re flying one in to preach at them about the final solution to the witchcraft problem. Her name’s Helen Ukpabio and she’s a “Lady Apostle” at the Liberty Gospel Church. She’s going to be doing something called a “Marathon Deliverance” for 12 days in March.

The poster advertising her visit is lots of fun. For instance, if you have any of the following conditions, please consult your local witch hunter for exorcism and deliverance:

• Having bad dreams
• Financial impotency and difficulties
• Unsuccessful life with disappointments
• Possessed by mermaid spirit and other evil spirits

So whether you’re poor or sometimes disappointed, or you’re possessed by those pesky mermaid spirits (and who isn’t these days?), Ukpabio can help you “receive freedom from the Lord.”

It’s just too bad she’s incapable of offering her victims freedom from herself. See, the witch hunting problem in Nigeria has gotten so bad that some extremely brave humanists have been organizing efforts to educate people on how we know that people like Ukpabio are dangerous and evil and wrong. Stepping Stones Nigeria has been the victim of attacks from Ukpabio’s Liberty Gospel Church, when members invaded their seminars, beating people up and stealing things.

And true to religious troll form, Ukpabio had the mermaid balls to actually sue SSN for depriving her church of the right to believe in witchcraft. The good news is that Ukpabio apparently believes that when people are presented with the facts about the witch hunting craze, they can’t go on believing in it. The bad news is that that’s just not true, case in point being the fact that she’s preaching the same nonsense here in America in 2011.

Imagine how much cognitive dissonance you’d have to ignore to run an organization devoted to stopping a particular religion (i.e. paganism, animism, or whatever they mean by witchcraft) and then turn around and sue someone else on the false grounds that they’re doing the same thing, which you really are doing.

Hopefully there will be some organized protests against this hateful lying bitch in Houston, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, check out this video she made about How Witchcraft Works. I could only watch a minute or so at a time without pacing around like an inmate in a psych ward that’s running low on medication, so you know, be warned.

Coast to Coast AM’s New Year’s Prediction Show

Former C2C AM host Art Bell, seen here recording a Bauhaus album.

Besides the Twilight Zone marathon, the best thing about New Year’s is how the “psychic” industry clings to the change in calendars in order to make a bunch of predictions for the next 12 months. The problem in writing about this is that these people usually do this on their own websites, which of course they can alter or delete when their predictions fail.

So the good folks at Something Awful are archiving a few of the predictions from one outlet in particular: Everyone’s favorite late-night radio talk show for truckers on massive amounts of amphetamines, Coast to Coast AM. Besides keeping a reliable archive to fact-check when it comes time for next year’s fake psychic circlejerk, it’s a nice case study in how psychics give the superficial appearance of having supernatural powers. Also, they’re pretty funny. For example:

Major earthquake in central/northern California in May.

Fuzzy language is a good way to cover your bases if you’re pretending to have magical powers. What makes an earthquake “major?” It’s not clearly defined anywhere. Of course there is seismic activity all the time all over California. So all you have to do to call this prediction a hit is take all the seismic data, find the day with the most activity during May, and call that a “major” earthquake. Other predictions use a similar approach by referring to “a plane between life and death,” “a major find of buried treasure,” “More tornadoes than usual,” “bad weather,” and a “very large object.”

Some predictions are just mundane and probable, if only because they’re based on things which are already happening. The economy will slowly improve, you say? Wow, what a risky prediction! Even if we all get hit with the coming global super-collapse of all civilization in six months, whoever predicted the economy slowly getting better can still claim accuracy since the economy slowly got better for a few months.

And then some of these predictions contradict each other. Also, they’ll never fucking happen:

Hillary Clinton will win the election over Obama.

Donald Trump will win the election as a third party nominee.

Obama… will cancel the election in November.

Bigfoot will be elected to the presidency.

And some are just incoherent and goofy:

Ron Paul will win the Republican nomination, but it will end up that drag queen RuPaul won through some accident in the vote count.

End of days will become disco nights. Blondie will write the sequel to the Rapture. The three wise men will be some three wise guys.

One domestic and one natural, with one being unnatural, will change the outcome of the election.

Finding a whole new species of human beings.

The Earth will supernova because of nitrogen and helium in the core of the Earth, not molten iron like everyone thinks it is.

So, uh… yeah. Be on the lookout for that stuff, too!

Fox News columnist offering $500 for someone to disrupt a science documentary about climate change

Remember back when Charlie Sheen was a thing and he was bitching and whining about how he only bought hookers because he didn’t know what to do with all his money? Junk science enthusiast and Fox propagandist Steve Milloy doesn’t have that problem. Miloy’s even more passionate about his bad ideas than Charlie Sheen is, so he’s willing to throw money at anyone stupid enough to repeat his nonsense in public.

There’s a screening of a documentary on climate change this Monday, January 9. Milloy wants to pay someone $500 to ask a question for him at the panel afterwards, because he’s way too much of a coward to do it himself. And even though he hasn’t seen the documentary, he knows his question won’t be covered in it. The problem for him is that it won’t be covered in the documentary because his question is stupid:

How long will it take for the 3 x 10²³ drops of water in the Himalayan glaciers to disappear?

What prompts his stupid question is that the press release of the documentary mentions that the Himalayan glaciers are “disappearing.” Well obviously there will be no problem with that at all until EVERY SINGLE DROP of the glaciers has already melted. So there! Checkmate, scientists!

Sri Ram Sena flies Pakistan flag over an Indian government building

In America, far right-wing militia types talk about the government staging false flag operations while calling into Alex Jones’ ham radio show under a pseudonym like “One-Eyed Leroy.” In India, the far right-wing militia types actually do the false flag operations themselves.

Sri Ram Sena is this horrible group of Hindu Nationalists in India. In a lot of ways they’re not too different from Christian Nationalists. I first wrote about them about a y ear ago when they were making the news for attacking women at pubs and threatening to attack unmarried couples celebrating Valentine’s Day in public. They also threatened to kidnap and forcibly marry them as punishment. And they raided their political opponents headquarters.

Along with physically attacking love wherever they see it, they also have a bug up their ass about Muslims. Especially those Muslims in Pakistan. See, there’s a bit of ugly history between the two countries, and some still haven’t let go of the old hostilities. So yada yada yada, now they both have nuclear weapons aimed at each other.

But even mutually assured destruction isn’t bad enough for some people, and that’s where the Sri Ram Sena enters the picture. They were alarmed at how many people don’t seem to care too much about hating Pakistanis anymore, so they hatched this plan to raise the flag of Pakistan over government buildings in India. Police say their goal was to create “communal disharmony” in the area because there is a large Muslim population there.

So people saw the flag, probably assumed it was either a mean-spirited prank or even a sign of an actual invasion of some sort, and threw rocks at their local Muslim prayer hall.

You would think that a really devoted Hindu Nationalist would buy into their own propaganda enough to not think that this kind of shit were necessary. If there really were another India-Pakistan war looming and only Hindu Nationalism could save India, why would anyone need to dishonestly provoke hatred in that way? The whole basis of their worldview is that these fights are ones people really care about and the conflict they dream about really is inevitable.

But that’s the problem with faith. It’s just not good enough of a reason to believe something, and even the most die-hard proponents of it recognize that. Deep down, they have the same doubts as the skeptics. They know the gods / God isn’t really going to smite their enemies, so they’re going to have to do it themselves. And that’s what’s really scary.

A Day on the Twitter with Bryan Fischer

Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This makes no fucking sense because truth is a quality of a statement which describes its factual accuracy and isn’t a human being which might wear shoes. But he might have been trying to point out how easily it is to make false statements and misrepresent the truth compared to the effort required to correct the lies.

Bryan Fischer is a living case study of this phenomenon. He’s the Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association, which is the organization which collaborated with Texas Governor Rick Perry in throwing their little rain dance / prayer rally last month. He’s also very active on The Twitter, spending maybe an hour or two every day typing out the most dishonest possible way to attack the gays, Muslims, liberals, moderate Republicans, and bears. That’s actual bears, not big gay dudes. He might be the inspiration for Stephen Colbert’s character’s fear and hatred of the godless killing machines.

“Seriously, you guys.”

For the reasons Twain summed up in the famous quote above, it’s pretty much impossible to refute every single tweet Fischer farts out onto the internet, unless one were to do it as a full-time job. So I thought I’d take his tweets from just one day and counter them. Or maybe just mock them.

Normal people would see this as a total non-sequitur. Not Bryan Fischer! To him, they’re connected. And that’s an elementary school… in Colorado… I think we all know who’s behind this plot:

The article he links to doesn’t say that CAIR essentially endorses him. What it says is that CAIR stated that Perry is “set apart” from other GOP candidates because he has a Muslim friend. He’s apparently the only one who can even say that he’s not bigoted against Muslims because after all some of his best friends are Muslims. And that’s supposed to be some kind of scandal.

This is in no way relevant only to Fischer, but the idea of predicting who the Republican nominee will be at this point is just pointless political masturbation. You can see that just by looking at where we were in the last election cycle at this point.

On September 1, 2007, a Republican candidate named Duncan Hunter won the Texas straw poll with 41% of the vote. Remember Duncan Hunter? Me neither. A few weeks earlier Mitt Romney won a straw poll at the Illinois state fair. Four years minus one day before Fischer twittered this, a television actor and former Senator named Fred Thompson declared his candidacy. I remember being terrified of Thompson for a few weeks after reading this article by Matt Taibbi about him. I was sure Thompson would win the nomination and the general election by appealing to the lucrative ‘dumbfuck’ demographic. But that’s the kind of stupid mistake you make when you speculate this far from the general election.

Law & Order & Failed Campaigns

And what about the eventual Republican nominee, John McCain? Just two months before this point in the election cycle, McCain fired 100 staffers due to severe financial problems. Later that month, his chief strategist and his campaign manager resigned.

If Fischer were twittering around that time he’d have been pompously declaring one of those “frontrunners” the one true candidate for the extreme wing of the conservative Republicans. Probably he’d have gone with Thompson, since they’re around the same age and he would probably have secret buttsecks with Fischer with a lot of discretion.

First of all, the article he’s citing mentions Christians in exactly one paragraph, and it doesn’t mention anything about Muslims starving them to death. What it does say is that there are about 1,000 Christians in all of Somalia, and some Muslims are tracking down and killing the few of them who are Muslim apostates. So Fischer’s lying about the starvation thing, but it’s not like he even needed to do so. What’s actually happening – at least according to the article he cites – should be bad enough for him to complain about. But apparently his persecution complex has an inexhaustible appetite for bullshit.

The actual substance of the article – if it can be said to have any at all – is that the famine in Somalia is not caused by the drought. It’s really al Qaeda’s fault. And of course it’s important to note that global politics can be extremely complicated and there are a lot of factors to consider. It’s not just the drought; Somalia has also for a long time had basically no functioning government. And like their fellow conservatives here in America, fundamentalist Muslims are opposed to humanitarian work when it’s done by the United Nations.

So it’s not entirely inaccurate to say that a large part of the problem in Somalia is that there’s no system of support for poor, starving people, and that part of that problem is due to Islamic militants. But the author here (Rachel Alexander of the unintentionally hilarious Townhall website) wants to disregard the drought and famine altogether so she can wrap up the problem in Somalia in a neat little package and call it al Qaeda. The sub-heading is “Al-Qaeda Affiliate, not Famine, is Responsible for Somalian Genocide” (emphasis mine).

Who is this Left person? Does he mean Lefter Küçükandonyadis, the 1950s Turkish soccer player? Or maybe he means the Greek author Lefteris Hapsiadis. The world may never know.

Of course Fischer’s just using a straw man here. He hears liberals complaining about all the racist things teabaggers do and say and all the racist signs they bring to their rallies and since he doesn’t find the racism too objectionable he concludes that all progressives think all of Obama’s critics are racist.

I can only really speculate here, but Fischer’s probably thinks he’s pointing out some kind of hypocrisy here, and that Salon and Darryl Hannah are equally racist as, oh, I don’t know, the 46% of Mississippi Republicans who think interracial marriage should be outlawed. Fischer lives in Tupelo, MS, by the way.

Well, I have checked and nobody has registered BryanFischer.xxx yet. So let’s get to it, people! He’s pretty much asking for it.

One problem here is that UPS is also unionized. I should know seeing that I actually work there. UPS workers belong to the Teamsters Union, which is probably the most powerful one in the United States – not that that’s saying very much. So if it were the case that unions are responsible for the USPS financial troubles, then UPS would be in even worse shape.

Another really bothersome aspect of this is how he seems to think it’s a terrible idea to have a large majority of an institution’s budget going to “labor costs.” If only they didn’t pay so much for workers to provide goods and services and paid more to the worthless bureaucrats and middle-management parasites, then all of this would have been avoided.

For the details on how the right-wing attack on the USPS is an attack on organized labor, I’d recommend checking out Allison Kilkenny’s recent article in truthout.

You also won’t find anything in the Constitution mentioning an Air Force. We could probably fund more than a few USPSes if we stopped spending such ridiculous amounts of money on planes and drones for the military.

Of course the most egregious part of this one is Fischer’s using the “Got your X right here” formula. So that implies that he’s saying that while grabbing his junk. So not only is he making a highly questionable claim – that he actually has genitalia – he’s forcing us to consider what it looks like, in the highly unlikely event that it exists.

The next rat to be smelled here is that the link he gives goes to the Moonie Times, which I thought hasn’t existed for a while now. Here is how the cult newspaper article starts off:

Jihadists among the Libyan rebels revealed plans last week on the Internet to subvert the post-Moammar Gadhafi government and create an Islamist state, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.

Hold the presses, people! They have said something on the internet! But even the Moonie Times isn’t dishonest enough to leave it at that:

Some U.S. officials sought to play down the remarks by noting that such Internet postings are not always accurate measures of jihadist plans.

You mean when someone says something on an internet forum, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true? Golly!

Twitter is a pretty great tool for journalists. Not only is it good for networking, but the 140 character limit really helps you be more concise. Never use a long word when a short one will do, that sort of thing. Instead of “boom years of ’93-’00,” he could have said “under Clinton” and saved a few characters.

This one falls into the category of outright lying. There was a Muslim Family Day at that venue, but it turns out it took place on September 4. In a rare moment of a conservative acknowledging objective reality, Fischer later corrected himself:

But by the point the damage had been done. Right-wing blogs ran with it, occasionally bothering to change the wording from “Muslims celebrate on 9/11″ to “Muslims celebrate sometime near 9/11.” Soon these people will start getting offended by any gathering of Muslims in the late summer until winter.

He probably should have also pointed out that Muslim Family Day has been going on since September of 2000, a full year before the 9/11 attacks, so his theory about it being a terrorism party doesn’t really make sense.

But that won’t matter. For guys like this, being proved wrong by the facts won’t change his mind. It’s he cared about the facts, he would have changed his mind about Muslims. If they have a Muslim Family Day on September 11, then it’s grotesque. But if they have a Muslim Family Day on September 4, it’s… still grotesque. To Bryan Fischer, it’s important that the Muslims lose either way.

There were actually a few more of these, but this idiot has eaten up too much of my time already.

‘5 Religious Organizations’ Updates

Last winter I wrote an article about five religious organizations you should hate. And since The BEAST is the one and only True News Source (peace ‘n blessings be upon Us), you may have missed some new developments for those groups. So here they are! But (spoiler alert) you should know that none of these updates should make any decent person stop hating them.

LOL WARREN JEFFS

Jeffs, seen here with one of his “child brides.”

In the section on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), I referred to the “prophet” Warren Jeffs’s 10 years-to-life sentence for being an accomplice to rape. That sentence has since been overturned by the Utah Supreme Court on the grounds that the jury were given faulty instructions.

So his conviction was overturned on a technicality. That’s the bad news. The good news for those of us in the popular anti-child-fucking demographic is that there are plenty of other child-rape charges against Jeffs to go through, and the courts in Texas are dealing with that as I’m writing this. This past week he was found guilty on two charges of sexual assault against 12 and 15 year old girls. The sentencing phase is curently underway.

This most recent trial contained 100% of the FDA’s recommended annual allowance of WTF. In classic megalomaniac-on-trial fashion, Jeffs first fired his expensive, high-powered attorneys and opted to represent himself with the help of “God’s word.” Then he started interrupting the judge and threatening the court with “sickness and death” unless they would “cease this prosecution against my pure and holy way.” Jeffs claimed it wasn’t him saying this though. It was all just a message from Jesus, presumably so he wouldn’t have to take any responsibility for it.

Later the court heard audio clips of Jeffs explaining to a 14 year old girl how best to be raped by him, and then another audio file of the actual rape itself. Here is one of the files used in court where Jeffs explains the system of arranged “marriage” and child rape to a young girl. Jeffs never learned from Nixon to stop recording audio when you’re doing incredibly evil, illegal shit.

The prosecution also showed pictures of the beds Jeffs allegedly used to rape kids and had a former FLDS member testify on the system of arranged marriages within the cult. The witness testifying was actually one of Jeffs’s step-mothers (Warren’s father, Rulon, also held the same position in the church before he died in 2002). FLDS is very meticulous on book-keeping because they want to have records which match the records kept in heaven. The court gave Jeffs 30 minutes for a closing statement. He used all of it, mostly just to stand there in silence, but he reportedly said, “I am peace” at one time.

It is a good thing he reminded the court that he’s peace because he was immediately afterwards found not guilty. No, just kidding, he was found guilty on 2 counts of sexual assault. The sentencing phase is now underway, and Jeffs faces up to life in prison. [UPDATE: He got life in prison, LOL]

Lord’s Resistance Amy

Thomas Kwoyelo, a former senior commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army, is on trial in Gulu, which is in northern Uganda. He has 65 charges against him which apparently took almost two hours to read out. They’re all from the deplorable crimes committed by the LRA, which I wrote about in the original article.

One way in which Kwoyelo’s trial has been awesome came from when the convoy dropped him off for his trial. There was also a marching band (via) there. If only Warren Jeffs had thought to bring along the FLDS marching band.

Kwoyelo is the first defendant out of hopefully many others in a move by the Ugandan government to bring the LRA to justice. Kwoyelo had applied for amnesty under the controversial Ugandan Amnesty Act, but his application is still pending. There is apparently a lot of double-standards in how the Ugandan government has been prosecuting, or trying to prosecute, LRA members and how their judicial proceedings have related to international law and the International Criminal Court.

Aside from the amnesty controversy, Kwoyelo’s attorneys plan their defense to be that charges which are breaches of the Geneva Convention have not been formally filed, and that the proseuction had not yet fully disclosed their files on Kwoyelo – at least, not at the time of the Human Rights Watch report cited above. Both of these issues may have been resolved by now, but I can’t find any more recent update since the second hearing, which was supposed to be July 25.

The UN Security Council has released a statement harshly condemning the LRA’s violence across not only in Uganda, but also in the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan. This is probably a positive development because the Ugandan government has a credibility problem in dealing with the LRA. They’ve granted amnesty to combatants who were higher in rank than Kwoyelo. Some spectators of the trial are suspicious of the government’s motives. They think that the trial is a PR move for the government to show off the efficacy of its new International Crimes Division. Even one mutilated LRA victim interviewed by a reporter said that the government should be concentrating on helping the war-torn regions of northern Uganda and that the trial will not do that.

The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice

“We wear the table cloths from Italian restaurants on our fucking heads.”

If you’ve made it this far, you might have expected that these updates are all going to be uplifting stories of assholes being brought to justice. Well, Saudi Arabia. That’s probably all I’ve got to say about those expectations.

The Saudi Arabian government’s reaction to the Arab Spring uprisings thruoghout the Middle East and beyond have been pretty much exactly what you’d expect. Back in March when it looked like Saudi Arabia might be the next country to really shake things up politically, the foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said that his family would “cut off any finger raised” against them. There were some protests afterwards, and things appear to have fizzled out since. So much for the hope of getting rid of one of the worst governments on the planet.

And my friends in the Religious Police have been adopting a similar ‘fuck you’ attitude towards the population it’s supposed to serve and protect. Only in their case, most of what they get involved in has this element of total goofiness in it because they’re so obsessed with these absurd superstitions.

One thing that’s awesome about the Religious Police is that they have an Anti-Witchcraft Unit. Wait, no, not awesome, I meant “pitiful and sad.” Last month the Anti-Witchcraft Unit received word that someone had found a decapitated wolf’s head wrapped up in women’s lingerie . If you’re a normal person, you might hear about that and think it’s the inevitable product of pent-up psycho-sexual frustration resulting from such a stifling and oppressive society. Sure, whoever did it is sick and needs help, but when you set up a society like Saudi Arabia, you’re kind of asking for a higher proportion of people who are not quite right in the head.

You’ll be surprised to learn that that is not at all how the Religious Police saw the matter! They immediately identified it as some sort of witchcraft, kind of like how they do with everything that’s not Wahhabi. Would they be able to break the spell? It turns out they did! Which should be pretty easy when the whole thing’s made up to begin with.

Speaking of women’s lingerie, there is also some conflict between the Kingdom and their Religious Police. The Kingdom is replacing all of the male salesmen at lingerie shops with women in order to reduce female unemployment, and the Religious Police and their advocates are pretty upset about that. They would like the lingerie shops to set up dividers to make sure men buying lingerie for one or several of their wives aren’t intermingling with the women working there.

And lastly, in surprisingly non-lingerie related Saudi news, a man going on a picnic with some friends was possessed by ghosts! At least, that’s what his friends said. And since they said so, that proves it’s true, so the Religious Police read the Koran at him and burned some incense. Somehow, this forced the ghost to leave the man’s body via his hand.

That is all for now.

6 Fundamentalist Movies You Should Watch

Gates of Hell

I learned about this movie from Right Wing Watch, which is an organization that watches the right wing. And they watched the right wing pushing this movie, and it looks awesome.

Have you heard about how conservatives have been trying to sell African-Americans on the idea of being against legal abortion lately? They’re putting up these nutty billboards (some of which imply that blacks are a distinct species) and running goofy political ads on the radio. See, they’re not racist anymore! They’re really concerned about black babies and how letting black women have abortions is like genocide. And that breaks their hearts, They are very concerned about black people. That’s what they’re pushing. It reminds me of how neo-Nazis like David Duke will pretend to be so compassionate to the Palestinians, when in reality they’re clearly more motivated by hating Jews than anything else.

Anyway, since the billboards and radio ads can only do so much, they’ve decided to make a movie about their abortion/race war fantasies. In this movie, black people are finally convinced by the WorldNetDaily (Molotov Mitchell of WND is the executive producer of this movie) that abortion is really a racist genocidal conspiracy against black people. Nevermind that nobody’s forcing anyone to get an abortion these days, that doesn’t matter. The important thing is that if we don’t outlaw abortion, these scary BLACK guys are going to start shooting doctors and liberals and probably your mom, too. So you better do what they say already.

This movie also strives to solve a major public relations problem for the anti-abortion zealot community. I could be wrong on this, but I’m pretty sure that every single anti-abortion doctor-killer or attempted doctor-killer has been a honky. If you line up their mug shots in a row, it looks like what the Children of the Corn would be like if they were allowed to live past their 19th birthday. Gates of Hell seeks to racially diversify the hate-filled anti-abortion terrorist demographic. Since reality won’t do it for them, they’ll have to make a movie about how they wish black people acted when it comes to abortion, like how colleges Photoshop in Hispanic kids in wheelchairs on their homepages.

See, it’s not this guy who’s threatening those of us who want to keep abortion legal and safe:

Molotov Mitchell of WND has an impressive IMDB page

It’s THIS guy:

Gosh, I wonder why anyone ever though conservatives were racist?

The Life Zone

Bitches love Jesus... I'm gonna get those bitches some Jesus.

The Life Zone is a movie about women who were all having an abobo at the same time and were all kidnapped by some anti-choice terrorist good guys. So they lock al the women up in some underground dungeon and force them  to carry on with being preggo until the baby jumps out of her vagina or however that works.

Their captor is some shady old man who leers on as the younger nurse-lady makes sure their pregnancies are going in the exact opposite way the women wanted. They all talk about abortion and have fourth-grade level arguments about it. And at the end it turns out that they were all in Purgatory the whole time to make sure their unborn babies would be able to go up to Heaven. Yay for massive simultaneous deaths during routine medical procedures!

But one of the women tried to induce a miscarriage during her pregnancy because she still believed that abortion is pretty awesome, so she goes to Hell. And  so does the nurse-lady, because she also died recently from committing suicide. And oh yeah, the captor turns out to be Satan.

The director of this movie is a former Republican judge and politician from New Jersey who had to quit because he kept on promoting his movies from the bench. I heard rumors that he would oftentimes sentence people to watch his movies, much like how  the senile Judge Wapner now sentences us all to drink his root beer. Anyway, this guy has another movie you may want to check out called “O.B.A.M. Nude,” which is about how Barack Obama sold his soul to the devil while in college and in exchange was given some mysterious power to turn the world into a socialist paradise for Satan. So that’s where he’s coming from…

Left Behind I-III

I have only seen the first two movies in the Trilogy O’ Kirk (We hardcore fans call it TOK for short on internet forums), but then again I haven’t seen any of the movies I’ve mentioned so far. Hey, this is about movies you should see, not necessarily movies I should see.

So way back in the day, Jesus promised he would return at the side of God  to kick the asses of the non-believers. St. John or whichever crackhead wrote Revelation took that  premise from Jesus and ran with it, elaborating it into a D&D-ish apocalypse fantasy. In the mid-19th century, some pastors merged in some passages from 1 Thessalonians and rapture theology was born.

But the rapture never happened. This made fundamentalist Christian authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins very sad and frustrated. They wondered: What if it really did happen? Hey, maybe it will happen, like, really soon! Wouldn’t that be awesome? LaHaye and Jenkins were getting all excited just thinking about it!

So they wrote a book about it. Then they wrote a few more books about it, and a few more. And then Kirk Cameron was all like, “Dudes! Let’s make some of these shitty books into unwatchable, straight-to-DVD movies!” And so it came to pass.

Cameron’s character starts off as a reporter for “GNN” who’s trying to find out where all those missing people have gone. Some people start asking him if he’s considered believing they all went to Heaven for the rapture. He hadn’t, but he takes that belief system out for a test drive, buys it, and it works out pretty well for him. He’s told that if he can bring 10 friends and family members in to start selling Amway products Christianity themselves, then he can definitely expect to achieve financial independence in 3 easy steps go to Heaven the next time Jesus sweeps his favorite people up into the sky.

Buck Williams also discovers that the UN Secretary General is the antichrist. GNN has a strict disclosure policy for when you are reporting on someone you believe to be the antichrist, but it’s OK in this case because he can hide his anti-antichrist bias fairly well.

The way you get to activate antichrist mode in the Left Behind universe is to advocate peaceful solutions to the territorial disputes in the Gaza Strip. That’s what the UN SecGen does, and that’s how Buck finds him out. You see, when someone tries to settle international disputes in a non-violent way, that’s a sure sign that they’re evil. The Left Behind crowd can easily tell how good someone is by how many wars they wage. If only it worked the same way with the State of New York Department of Justice and drunken disorderly charges.

In the end I guess Kirk Cameron sneaks into the UN, gains the antichrist’s trust, and just kinda hangs out while God comes back to kick his ass. Because it’s not like either of them can do anything to change what’s going to happen. Supposedly this God person predetermined all of it. That takes a lot of suspense out of this trilogy. We all know there’s no chance the good guy will tragically (?) die after a cameo appearance by Cthulu. It’s just going to be Jesus guiding Mike Seaver through a fundie’s fever dream.

But there’s still lots to learn from Left Behind, especially in how these people view nonbelievers. Basically, they think we’re all extremely stupid and shallow, that the only reason we don’t believe is because if we did we’d all have to confess our sins and submit before the Jesus and we’re all just too proud for that scene. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that maybe we don’t believe because none of the miraculous events in the books and the movies have actually happened. This is all meant to be fiction, right?

But maybe not. If you read the newspapers and do a little free association here and make a few leaps of faith there, it’s possible to link real current events to all this ancient mythology the Left Behind groupies seem to be so obsessed over. And that’s where this stuff starts to get creepy.

Expelled!

Expelled! is a creationist propaganda movie. It also gets pretty far into conspiracy theories and Holocaust revisionism, but mainly this is about creationism.

The filmmakers told their interview subjects that they were making a documentary about the intersection between science and religion. This is how they got people like PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, and Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education to speak with them on camera. Obviously I don’t have any problem at all with this deceitful tactic since we at The BEAST do this kind of thing pretty regularly. The problem… well one of the problems with this movie is selective editing. This is very obvious when you watch the film because the cuts are so fast and awkward that it’s as if Michael J Fox did the editing the old-fashioned way with a razor after a few days off his meds.

According to Expelled!, evolution isn’t accepted by relevant experts because there’s a lot of evidence supporting it, but because there’s a massive worldwide conspiracy of scientists which controls with an iron fist all the peer review literature and all the important positions in relevant fields. So it’s the same premise used by pretty much every other goofy conspiracy theorist, with a twist: If you disagree with Stein and his friends at the Discovery Institute, you sir are a NAZI because this anti-God conspiracy goes all the way back to Nazi Germany.

Yes, as a matter of fact I do got mittens.

The National Center for Science Education has a website devoted to debunking Expelled!, if you’re interested in the details of why Ben Stein is wrong about everything. Maybe you should read that before watching the movie, just in case watching the movie first causes you to start reading about the science in Ben Stein’s voice.

Four Lions

These gentlemen represent an existential threat to our way of life.

I’m going to have to cheat a little with these last two movies which focus on Islam. The ones mentioned earlier were made by the true believers themselves, but here they are the subject. Did I cheat that way because I’m an uncouth American who needs the movies I watch to be westernized for me to appreciate? Probably!

Four Lions is actually about four humans who aren’t lions at all. But they are Muslim wannabe terrorists living in England and planning a suicide bombing for Allah. Hilarity ensues.

We have this disturbing way of looking at Muslim terrorists here in America. It’s the same way they probably see themselves: as a grave, existential threat to Western secular democracy on par with the fascists during World War II. And if you suggest that maybe they’re just a bunch of criminal but laughable idiots who sometimes succeed but usually fail hard, then you’re disrespecting their victims.

It’s a lot like how people still believe in conspiracy theories about John F Kennedy’s death in that when something terrible happens, we ascribe an amount of meaning proportional to the amount of misery it’s caused, even when that connection is not supported by the facts. We don’t like the idea of someone as esteemed as Kennedy being blown away by some down-and-out loser who’s been rejected even by the Soviet Union. It’s much more comforting to believe that he died for brave principles and that he was taken down by one or another shady cabal of evil people with lots of power. Everything seems less random and fragile that way, regardless of the facts.

And in the same way, we’d like for the ‘bad guys’ in the Post-9/11 World news narrative/Michael Bay movie to be not just genuinely bad guys. We want them to be absolutely demonic and with superhuman powers. We can’t have them in court because they might say something which will somehow transform normal, rational Americans into Islamic extremists who want to let Khalid Sheikh Mohammed walk around NYC and plan more terrorist attacks. Because people can do that kind of thing with mere words, apparently.

If you believe in that perception of al Qaeda and others like them, then Four Lions is completely heretical. And what’s funny is that it will outrage Muslim extremists themselves too, and for the same reasons. It just doesn’t take terrorism seriously enough! If you want to laugh at Islamic terrorism, do it in the wake of a drone’s airstrike. It’s for some reason blasphemous to laugh at them for being gullible, ineffectual morons with goofy beliefs and embarrassing, mundane, interpersonal relationship problems.

Oh yeah, they all die in the end.

The Infidel

In a way, The Infidel is a mirror-image opposite of Four Lions. While Four Lions focuses on the titular extremist characters who create humor by interacting with moderates, The Infidel’s main character Mahmud is a moderate Muslim who’s constantly befuddled by the extremist wackos he occasionally crosses paths with in his everyday life. His sister or cousin or someone is about to marry an extremist Muslim cleric he hates, and he’s gotta deal with that somehow. Even his own daughter randomly yells jihadist-y slogans about restoring the caliphate.

Then Mahmud finds out that he was adopted and that his parents were Jewish. So he’ll have to go through a crisis of identity where he learns how to say “Oy, vey” correctly and wear the tattered remains of a Yamaka he just burnt at a pro-Palestinian rally. And then there’s the matter of the radical cleric marrying into his (now Jewish, apparently) family. All this while poor ol’ Mahmud just wants to go on being a half-assed cultural Muslim who doesn’t go to the mosque or care much about politics, but loves to listen to cheesy 80s music and maybe has a drink every once in a while.

The reason you really should see this movie is because the next time some dickhead whines about how people are too afraid to mock Islam like they do Christianity, you can both watch this movie together and prove said dickhead wrong. The attacks on fundamentalist thinking in it are stronger than you’d get in a typical Christian-mocking movie or TV show, but it manages to raise serious concerns while keeping a sense of humor.

What if everyone forgot about the National Day of Prayer, like almost everyone does every year?

They don’t really answer that question in this commercial, but the vague response seems to be this: Terrible things would happen, that’s what! OMG OMG WTF Be afraid!

This idea of the Christian God being like an abusive stepdad who threatens to kill his family if they don’t buy him a nice tie for Father’s Day definitely has its biblical basis. Some of the more modern Christians try to frame this as if God’s usually protecting us, and that when horrible things happen that’s just the physical world attacking us for being sinful and it happens as a result of God’s inaction. But then there’s Isaiah 45:7:

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

I still don’t get why people who believe in gods never seem to consider the possibility that God’s as petulant and childish as he appears to be in the Bible. If a real person made these kinds of threats, they’d probably be locked away. But when it’s an imaginary deity, suddenly they deserve worship. It makes no sense at all.

That last sentence was brought to you by Captain Obvious.

Mississippi town bans fortune telling

The Meridian, MS town council has for for decades banned fortune telling, no doubt because it was such a popular place for fortune-telling types. But recently someone tried to open a business which would challenge that ban, and the town council decided to stick to their guns. The esteemed stateswoman Mary Perry explains the rationale for her decision:

“I read my Bible, too, and it talks about fortune telling and so forth,”

For those unfamiliar, the Bible is this religious text which is split into two sections. You’ve got the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament is mostly about fortune telling and the New Testament covers And So Forth.

Perry continues with her brilliant legal analysis:

“Everyone has their own opinion and can do what they want but I try to follow what is legal and within my heart, and after praying about something. I kind of go with that”

There should be some kind of mechanism which automatically removes people from office when they vote against letting people do what they want and then explain their decision to not let people do what they want by saying that people can do what they want.

Maybe she meant that everyone can do what they want as long as what they want to do is run for office to overturn this weird prohibition. Probably more likely is the possibility that she’s just puking out word salad and has no idea what the actual sentences coming out of her mouth mean.

Ken Ham will have a completely normal replica of Solomon’s Temple not like that weird one you have

Like I said before, I really feel sorry for whoever works at the People For the American Way whose job it is to watch and listen to all those hours and hours of Christian broadcasting to try to find the oasis of awesomeness in the middle of the desert of praisin’ the loard.

This time we’ve got Mark Looy on a Christian television show. Looy’s a cofounder of Answers in Genesis, who built the Creationist “Museum” in Petersburg, KY.  They’re also building a replica of Noah’s Ark, down to the last cubit and “kind,” with taxpayer funding. The host of the show asked Looy what’s next, and he said they were thinking of re-creating Solomon’s Temple. He added:

“but it’s not going to be some kind of secular temple where all sorts of weird religious ceremonies are held.”

That word, secular, I don’t think it means what Looy thinks it means. But if that’s not where they plan to hold their weird religious ceremonies, then where will Answers in Genesis have their weird religious ceremonies? Having been there, I’d have to say that just walking through the Creationist “Museum” seemed a lot like a weird religious ceremony.

But that’s not all! They also plan on building a replica of the Tower of Babel. This on its own is awesome if you know the story of it, but if you don’t, here it is: Back in the day, people wanted to make their own stairway to heaven, so they decided to build a huge tower. It was basically the space elevator of the Bronze Age. This made God real mad because as you know if you’ve read the Old Testament, God has serious insecurity issues and doesn’t want to share his position with anybody. So he fucked with everybody’s minds and made them all speak different languages. Unable to communicate, they were not able to finish building the tower.

If that’s too crass of a way to put it for you, I’ll put the King James version of the story here:

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

The lesson I derive from this story as a secular humanist is that we all ought to start learning as many languages as we can. That way we re-build this thing and send a few guys with names like Igor the Unreasonable up the elevator in the Babel Tower (which is what it would be called nowadays) up to heaven so they can teach this God character a lesson he won’t soon forget. We have to show this God person he can’t keep pushing us around with earthquakes and tsunamis and stuff like that.

But as Christians, the lesson the AIG people should learn is that we shouldn’t want anything like a Tower of Babel built ever again because it would offend God. We should be fighting each other so we don’t threaten God’s power. There’s another problem for God’s omnipotence, but it’s not really dealt with very well in the Bible. And Answers in Genesis definitely won’t be exploring that question very deeply in any of their new theme park rides.

The harm in “traditional healing”

A few weeks ago when I wrote about a new age exposition here in Western New York, a few commenters on Facebook were whining about how I could dare to criticize the idiots who attended and the frauds who sold overpriced garbage to them. Here’s what one of them said:

Let whackos be wackos. Nothing wrong with them at all- they’re just wackos. Live and let live….. Whether the vendors are con-artists or not… Wackos need to buy their wacky stuff. It’s good for the economy.

Usually I just direct people who make this kind of argument to whatstheharm.net for lots of examples with what’s wrong with “wackos” selling quack “treatments” to the gullible. But since I don’t have a Facebook account, I’ll have to just write about a recent example in the news here.

Tanzania has outlawed witch doctors and traditional “healers” recently due to a mass killing of albinos for their body parts to use in magic potions. But that doesn’t mean their government will do anything about one of them selling the same crap to desperate sick people when the “miracle pastor” selling it happens to be making a lot of money off of it.

There is a line 16 miles long stretching to Rev Ambilikile “Babu” Mwasapile’s house in a remote area of Tanzania. They’re all waiting to pay the equivalent of 30 cents to get a mixture of water and herbs which, according to the BBC, is “safe to drink.” The problem is that it’s not really safe to buy. The people waiting in line for this have no real shelter besides their automobiles (if they happen to have driven there), and no access to clean water. So far 52 have died just waiting in line to buy this stuff.

Maybe some of them would have died of whatever they were trying to cure anyway. After all, they wouldn’t be going to such extreme measures if they didn’t have some serious medical ailment already.

Fortunately even the guy profiting off of all this insanity is calling for fewer customers, since it’ll probably turn out that he’s caused more suffering in his business venture than he’s alleviated. When this story came out, he was asking for no new arrivals until April 1. Also the tests to see if his concoction had any medical benefit were still ongoing. But even if it turns out it has some measurable positive effect, he should still be subject to the law for selling it without doing any real tests or seeking any approval for it at all.

Updates!

There are a few updates on groups from my 5 Religious Organizations You Should Hate article.

Appolonia Mathia, a reporter who covered the massacres of the Lord’s Resistance Army, died in a motorcycle accident.  She was with her son at the time of the accident and he is apparently still in a coma.

And in slightly more upbeat news, a relative by marriage of Bal Thackeray and fellow member of the Sri Ram Sena is huffing and puffing over a model’s proposal to appear naked for the Indian cricket team if they won the Cricket World Cup against Pakistan.

“We are totally against such vulgarity and obscenity,” fumes Shalini Thackeray of the right wing Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. Shiv Sena says it will handle things ‘their way’ if the government doesn’t step in to stop such gimmicks.

Poonam Pandey, the model in question, responds:

“I don’t care if people have a problem. I am one of the most downloaded models online. I don’t need to do this for publicity. I am doing what I want to do.”

And an update from that update is that India did win the Cricket World Cup. Pandey is calling for patience and assures everyone that she intends to fulfill her promise.

OK, and this is the last one. Remember when the former first lady of Japan did all that crazytalk about eating the Sun and traveling to other planets on flying saucers? Well a Christian Dominionist named C Peter Wagner is saying that that kind of thing is the reason for the Sendai earthquake. This guy is very upset with what he believes is a pagan stronghold on Japan, which prevents God’s love from stopping tectonic plates from killing lots of people. Specifically, he thinks that the Japanese head of state fucks a Sun Goddess. Literally.

So this not the kind of Christian who thinks that witchcraft, casting spells, demons, and that sort of thing are bad because they aren’t real and merely distract attention from the theology he happens to prefer. He really thinks all that stuff has real, empirical effects on the physical world. Which I would think makes him a lot closer to a pagan or demon worshipper than the mostly secular people he’s projecting that belief onto.

Repent Amarillo guy will run for mayor of some town

Hey, remember those distinguished gentlemen from Amarillo, Texas who like to execute Santa Claus in effigy and harass patrons of swingers’ clubs? Their leader is running for mayor of Amarillo. Here is a video of him in what looks like a church, announcing his candidacy:

At the 1:47 mark, you can hear him say this (emphasis mine, factual and grammatical errors his):

“It is time that Christians rise up and start taking responsibility of their civic duties seriously and start running for office.”

Yes, the time has come for Christians to start running for office. They must start doing this. For too long, only non-Christians have been running for office.

He prefaces all this with a long reading from Romans 13, which I initially thought was the one the KKK likes so much. But after checking back to where I heard that, it turns out it was actually the 12th chapter of Romans. So it’s totally different! Oh, except he has the exact same “Christian flag” as the “Grand Wizard” of the Klan in the Safran video.

KKK Grand Wizard Chris Johnson showing off their Christian flag

David Grisham of Repent Amarillo announcing his mayoral candidacy

I don’t think this means Grisham is a secret Klansman, or even that he’s necessarily racist. The Christian flag seems more like a dog whistle than the established flag of any particular Christian extremist organization. If you go to the Focus on the Family HQ in Colorado Springs, you will see it there also:

According to Wikipedia, it was first designed in early 20th century Brooklyn, probably by Satanic hipsters trying to be ironic. So again, Grisham’s not necessarily a Klansman just because he and the KKK share a flag, just like he’s probably not a communist just because he seems to strongly imply in his campaign video that he’s going to try to use government power to shut down what I’m sure is Amarillo’s totally happening bar scene. But still, very creepy, especially if he ends up winning.

Uganda facepalm

Last Friday, Rachel Maddow had a segment on the opposition to all the anti-gay sentiment in Uganda, centering around the recent murder of gay rights activist David Kato. A bishop there spoke at his funeral, and Maddow played an excerpt of the video. Here is part of the transcript:

I’m not lgbt but I know people that are lgbt and I respect them for what they are and I believe they are going to heaven. They are going to heaven. If they don’t believe, that’s another matter about you if you are a believer, don’t be discouraged.

Even the more liberal, ecumenical religious leaders who lean more towards universalism than their fundamentalist counterparts in Uganda can’t seem to help bashing non-believers. They can respect the LGBT community for what they are, but they can’t respect the freethought community for what they are.