A common response to criticisms of religion is that its adherents can sometimes do good things, even if it’s for irrational reasons. That’s fair enough, but at the same time it’s useful to remember that while some good can be mixed in with the bad, sometimes religions create institutions of pure evil. Here are a few of them: (more…)
From the Washington Post:
NEW DELHI – A bomb blast in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi, during the height of the daily sunset prayer ceremony Tuesday, injured at least 32 people and killed a 2-year-old child, officials said. Authorities said the blast was a terrorist attack.
One of the survivors later took to the Twitter in order to blast the Supreme God in the Vaishnavite tradition of Hinduism Vishnu for its negligence:
Yes, that is still funny. I have decreed it so.
A group called Indian Mujaheddin claimed responsibility, calling it retaliation over a court ruling dividing some “holy” site between Muslims and Hindus. Indian authorities aren’t sure if it’s homegrown or based in Pakistan. Either way it’s fueled a partisan divide between the ruling party in India and their own equivalent to our teabaggers:
A spokesman for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads the opposition, blamed the bombings on what they said was the government’s lax attitude toward terrorism and expressed anger that the holy Hindu city, often called the Hindu Mecca or Indian Jerusalem, was targeted.
For those who don’t remember (i.e. everyone reading this), I called the Bharatiya Janata Party the equivalent to our teabaggers because they’re a pretty extreme right-wing political party who last year went on a crusade against single women drinking in pubs, which then evoked a hilarious international response.
In the dreary tradition of religious stories that appear here, there’s pretty much no protagonists here. Indian Mujaheddin – well, obviously fuck them. The victims, they’ll probably keep believing in and worshiping deities which apparently stood by and watched while people actively praying to them were targeted by a rival faction of superstitious morons. And even the ones taking the most hard-line position against the terrorists are only doing so in order to defend their own superstition and to make political hay of it.
There’s been another major WikiLeaks data dump. The previous ones which made the news here in America focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But this one shifts focus from the Pentagon to the State Department, releasing around 250,000 lightly classified documents which reveal the inner workings of US diplomatic relations.
The usual cast of clowns are up in arms about this, calling for a quasi-Stalinist government stranglehold of information and war on the press for reporting embarrassing facts about them. Republican Congressman Pete King of Long Island, NY, is calling for WikiLeaks to be classified as a terrorist organization, and the reality television star / internet troll Sarah Palin compared WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the Taliban. She also suggested that the government use “cyber tools” in order to track him down. Perhaps the cyber police could use their cyber tools in order to backtrace it. And when that happens, consequences will never be the same.
But the American right wing isn’t the only political faction angry with WikiLeaks. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims that WikiLeaks is part of an American plot against his country with the goal of stopping Iranian nuclear capabilities because some of the leaked cables contain pleas from other countries in the region calling on the American political leadership to attack Iran’s nuclear sites.
To be fair, Ahmadinejad is not exactly the Taliban. For one thing, Iran is mostly Shia while the Taliban is Sunni. But when you’ve got two opposing sides, like the political leaderships of America and Iran, and they both accuse a journalistic organization of being on the side of their enemy, then that’s a pretty strong indication that the journalistic organization in question is not a part of either camp. They’re just doing their job. And that job happens to involve publishing information which will make powerful people in all camps extremely angry.
I normally stay away from sports metaphors, but if you’ve got two opposing teams both of which accuse the referee of favoring their opponents, then similarly that would be a pretty strong indication that the ref is actually being fair and that it’s the players who are biased in their own favor. WikiLeaks is like that kind of referee, but obviously on a much more significant scale.
So the whining of world political leaders over WikiLeaks have basically here been reduced to the level of discourse normally reserved for Buffalo sports fans. Or even, now, the players themselves, but that’s a different story altogether. It’s pathetic.
Joe Lieberman has also weighed in on the subject. He, like many others, is of the opinion that WL puts American lives at risk, but stops short of calling them a terrorist organization. White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs also reiterated the claim that WL puts American lives at risk. But this seems to be largely just chest-pounding, since neither statements contain any specific information in the now-public cables which connect the data to any risk at all. Lieberman and Gibbs are simply asserting that claim without any data to support their assertions. And it can’t reasonably be said that drawing a specific connection between the cables and supposed danger to American diplomats must remained classified because thanks to WikiLeaks and the newspapers involved, those cables are now available to the public.
The only way that the position of “WL endangers Americans” can be maintained would be if a much more general connection were to be made. For example, since the release of these documents makes the DoS look bad, then other countries might be less willing to cooperate with them. But that would be the case for any reporting which reflected poorly on the State Department. Taken to its logical conclusion, that line of thinking would mean a necessary prior restraint on any reporting on the State Department, which would be a problem in a country with something like a First Amendment and a Supreme Court which rules against prior restraint.
If that weren’t bad enough for this “OMG Julian Assange endangers Americans” argument, there’s one final nail in the coffin here. Prior to the release of these documents, WL offered to review the information by proxy with the State Department, just as they had with the Pentagon in the previous cases involving military issues. Here is a link to the relevant correspondences from the UK’s Index on Censorship, but this is the important quote which gives lie to this claim about how the State Department would do anything to prevent these alleged risks to American lives, from State Department legal adviser Harold Hongju Koh:
We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials
So even if you were to believe the ‘putting lives at risk’ claim at face value, the underlying and unspoken claim that the State Department cares very much about these risks is completely ridiculous. They clearly don’t care enough about these imaginary risks to bother talking to a few icky computer nerd hackers. Gross!
Here are some depictions of what funny atheists might be like.
American Atheists recently won a lawsuit against the state of Kentucky regarding certain language in some 2006 legislation which Franklin Circuit Judge Thomas Wingate ruled a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. At first, the judge was all like NUH-UH:
“The statute pronounces very plainly that current citizens of the Commonwealth cannot be safe, neither now, nor in the future, without the aid of Almighty God. Even assuming that most of this nation’s citizens have historically depended upon God, by choice, for their protection, this does not give the General Assembly the right to force citizens to do so now.”
Bad advice is bad.
And then the “Democratic” Party’s state Representative/”Christ is King Baptist Church” Pastor Tom Riner of Louisville, who originally inserted the language into the bill in 2006, was all like YEAH-HUH:
“They make the argument … that it has to do with a religion,” Riner said, “and promoting a religion. God is not a religion. God is God.”
It just kills me when believers talk about their particular religious position (which are always and inevitably an incredibly small minority amongst the rest) as if it were just a simple fact of life, like death and taxes. That’s the only way one could possibly justify thinking that talking about a deity is somehow “not religious.” It is as if Riner thinks the question of whether or not he’s right about God is just a settled matter, with no consideration for others whose ideas about a god might be slightly, or even very, different.
It’s not even about just pleasing us cranky, litigious atheists. Deists believe in God just as much as the fundamentalist Christians, but they would also object to the idea of God being something upon which we should depend. Even other Christians could object to that based on their own beliefs. If he wants to ignore objections others might raise to his theology, he’s going to have to keep that kind of approach in the pulpit and in his private life, and leave it behind in what is supposed to be the modern civilized world of government under our secular Constitution.
And I have to wonder, if this God is supposed to be so all-powerful, why would it even need to know that we’re depending on it? Is it keeping tabs on the Kentucky State Office of Homeland Security to make sure people are thinking of it? If people were so dependent, wouldn’t it just know that fact? This thing supposedly created the whole Universe, and it’s acting like an uber-insecure teenage girl, according to Riner. This kind of crap makes me feel bad on any deity’s behalf, if it turns out there really is one.
Hi. My name is Josh and I am in the snake oil business.
You can email me by clicking on the nanobot above. You can also get in touch with me by going into your bathroom, turning off the lights, lighting at least seven candles, staring into the mirror, and saying my name three times.
As a matter of fact, I am standing behind you right now, watching you read this. Do you feel that? It's a knife, pressed up against your back. Now gimme all your money or I'll cut ya.
