Easter

Divine Irony:

↵ Reblogged from religionisbs

Segregation From Reality

This has been a Southern/Confederate speciality literally for centuries. Facts and reality too painful to face? Just ignore them and cling to the myth. 

Political Animal:

David Roberts’s analysis of the American right’s self-segregation from reality, though written before the Moore news broke, nevertheless explains why Moore will likely win in a landslide:

The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.

The primary source of this breach, to make a long story short, is the US conservative movement’s rejection of the mainstream institutions devoted to gathering and disseminating knowledge (journalism, science, the academy) — the ones society has appointed as referees in matters of factual dispute.

But the right’s institutions are not of the same kind as the ones they seek to displace. Mainstream scientists and journalists see themselves as beholden to values and standards that transcend party or faction. They try to separate truth from tribal interests and have developed various guild rules and procedures to help do that. They see themselves as neutral arbiters, even if they do not always uphold that ideal in practice.

The pretense for the conservative revolution was that mainstream institutions had failed in their role as neutral arbiters — that they had been taken over by the left, become agents of the left in referee’s clothing, as it were.

SNIP 

Moore win would be the least surprising development in modern American politics. There are millions of Americans, in Alabama and elsewhere, who walked away from facts, truth and reason decades ago. They will never come back. They are wedded to the vision of a permanent 1950s where women, African-Americans, members of the LGBTQ community and anyone who isn’t a straight white Christian male knows their place and knows their role. They regarding voting Democratic as a sin, not what Moore allegedly did to those young women. There is no bottom to the American right, no limits to its loathsomeness, no cap on its cruelty. When it comes to viciousness and venality, it’s fair to say that right-wingers just can’t get enough–and only want Moore.

Blindly Following

Divine Irony:

(Source: iamatheistgirl)

Witness

Divine Irony:

Ghost Hunting

Divine Irony:

WWJD

Divine Irony:

confrontingbabble-on:

To build a better society…takes…rational reasoning…and secular humanism…not religious fantasy…

Your Sign

Divine Irony:

Schools Warned Away From Myth-Promoting ArkPark

Because deliberately shoving anti-science lies down the throats of innocent children should be a crime.

Linda Blackford and Bill Estep at the Herald:

A secular foundation has contacted hundreds of public schools in Kentucky to warn them against taking field trips to the Ark Encounter, the new amusement park featuring a 500-foot replica of Noah’s Ark and a belief that the world is only 6,000 years old.

That's a representation of a myth, not a "replica" of anything real.  And if it were, the fraud built by modern construction equipment is still orders of magnitude too small to carry what they myth-mongers claim it did.

Officials with the Freedom From Religion Foundation say field trips would expose children to religious proselytizing that would violate the constitutional separation between church and state.

In reply, Kentucky Education Commissioner Stephen Pruitt sent a message to school districts late Monday saying that neither outside groups nor the Kentucky Department of Education should dictate field trip selection. But, he wrote, “it is important to remind educators that at all times and under all circumstances, field trips should be a direct extension of classroom learning. As a result, all off-site trips should be directly related to the school curriculum and should seek to maximize student learning by enhancing the classroom experience.”

All public school field trips should be approved by the school’s Site-Based Decision Making Council, made up of the principal, teachers and parents, and local school boards. Brad Hughes, spokesman for the Kentucky School Boards Association, said districts are encouraged to make sure that field trip approval policies are in place at the school and district levels.

Foundation co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said the group sent letters to more than 1,000 school districts in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia warning against organizing trips to the Ark.

The foundation has heard from parents concerned their districts will organize trips, such as year-end field trips.

“That would be completely inappropriate,” Gaylor said. “This is an attempt to proselytize children. The public school is to educate, not indoctrinate.”

Donald Ruberg, an attorney for the Grant County schools and an expert in education law, said he thinks the foundation’s position that school field trips would be impermissible in all cases is wrong.

“I think they are grossly overstating their case,” he said. “That’s not a correct interpretation of the law, in my opinion.”

You want to challenge the Establishment Clause, motherfucker, you better be stacking up piles of money taller than that fake boat to defend all the lawsuits from parents who don't want their children abused by freakazoid grifters.

Magic

Divine Irony:

↵ Reblogged from cure-your-delusions

Blasphemy

Divine Irony:

 

 

confrontingbabble-on:

To those prepared to engage in (Abrahamic) child sacrifice…speaking out against child sacrifice…is blasphemy…

To those prepared to engage in (Hebrew) animal sacrifice…speaking out against animal sacrifice…is blasphemy…

To those prepared to engage in (Christian) human/deity sacrifice…and ritual cannibalism (eating it’s flesh and drinking it’s blood)…speaking out against human/deity sacrifice and ritual cannibalism…is blasphemy…

To those prepared to engage in (Televangelist) fleecing the gullible……speaking out against fleecing the gullible …is blasphemy…

Everyone’s freedom of expression…requires scrubbing legislation of any sectarian religious coercion…of other/different believers, or non-believers…

 

Strengthening Faith

Divine Irony:

“…As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn’t get it right. There was no celestial churning, no maker’s dance, no vomiting of galaxies, no snake or kangaroo ancestors, no Valhalla, no Olympus, no six-day conjuring trick followed by a day of rest. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But here’s something genuinely odd. The wrongness of the sacred tales hasn’t lessened the zeal of the devout in the least. If anything, the sheer out-of-step zaniness of religion leads the religious to insist ever more stridently on the importance of blind faith…”

Salman Rushdie

http://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/oct/16/salmanrushdie

Pink Unicorn

Divine Irony:

• ↵ Reblogged from thedragoninmygarage

How to Tell the Difference

Divine Irony:

Faith

Divine Irony:



confrontingbabble-on:

My invisible talking unicorn says you're wrong, Ricky.

Questions for Theists

PZ Myers, on why it is not closed-minded to demand reasonable kinds of evidence.

Greta Christina has followed up on EbonMuse’s challenge to theists, listing the kinds of evidence that would convince them that their beliefs were true.

If I’m such an open-minded atheist — if I really am an atheist because I think the God hypothesis is unsupported by the evidence — what evidence for God would I accept? What would it take to change my mind?

I’m going to take a rather different approach: I’m going to tell theists to not bother.


It’s not that I’m unwilling or unable to change my views, or that I think I’m absolutely right about everything (I already know I’m not). Physicists, for instance, frequently explain things to me that make me toss out a lot of preconceptions. It’s just that I know theists are wrong. I’ve been through these arguments many times before, and I know what they’re about, and I know what approaches the true believer will take, and I’m not going to accept any of their arguments, so we might as well not waste time with them.

Basically, I have a set of simple prerequisites that theists can’t meet — their beliefs fundamentally contradict any reasonable expectations. Here’s what I would demand:

• They must accept the evidence of the natural world. What that means is that the first thing they have to do is acknowledge the validity of scientific explanations, because they are based on empirical knowledge. You don’t get to advance your hypothesis about how the universe works by throwing out the entire body of accumulated human wisdom!
  
• They have to accept that they don’t know any more than I do about the nature of entities outside this universe. Deities and afterlives and all that crap are outside human experience; you don’t get to sashay in and announce that you personally have direct knowledge of the mind of god that I am not allowed to have. We have to restrict ourselves to information that is universally accessible. Which, of course, means that most theists claims are bogus, because they are unknowable.
  
• They have to recognize that extant religions are all false. We know enough about the history of religion to recognize their idiosyncratic and human origins. If you can see that Scientology and Mormonism are frauds, then you should be able to see that Christianity and Islam are similarly the product of deluded human minds. Don’t waste our time trying to persuade me that debunked beliefs are really true.
  
• They must define their god or supernatural property clearly and unambiguously. Inevitably, every faith-head fails on this criterion: go ahead, try to get a Christian to give a consistent description of Jesus’ role in their life. I guarantee you that every time an atheist tries to pin them down on something concrete, they’ll rapidly fall back on Karen Armstrong-style platitudes, which are all empty noise. “God is Love” is utter bullshit.
  

I think that even asking for things like miracles and prophecies and consistent holy books and deities manifesting on earth is conceding way too much — it’s treating their claims of the kind of phenomena that would validate their faith as reasonable forms of evidence. They’re not. Those are the things theists tell each other to “prove” their beliefs, and they’re bogus — they’ve never demonstrated anything.

Break the cycle of lies. Stop framing atheist questions in theistic terms.

Slice the Mythology Out of Thanksgiving

Not happy feasters eager to share and be friends, but invaders bent on genocide.

Tim Weed at TPM:

It’s what might be called the Thanksgiving Myth — and it’s not wildly off base as far as it goes. But some important context is missing. This is a problem, because a nation’s foundational mythology determines its self-image and deeply affects the behavior of its government and citizenry.

From 1616 to 1619, a series of virgin-soil epidemics spread by European trading vessels ravaged the New England seaboard, wiping out up to 95 percent of the Algonkian-speaking native population from Maine to Narragansett Bay. The coast was a vast killing zone of abandoned agricultural fields and decimated villages littered with piles of bones and skulls. This is what the Pilgrims encountered when they landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Not a pristine wilderness, but the devastated ruins of a once-thriving culture, a haunting boneyard which English libertine Thomas Morton later described as a “newfound Golgotha.”

Between the freakazoid Puritans who viewed the natives as demons, and the slightly later thieves desperate for land, what Native Americans remained to assert ownership quickly became a convenient enemy.

In May of 1637, colonists from Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay, with a group of their Indian allies, set fire to a fortified Pequot stronghold on the Mystic River. An estimated 700 Pequots perished, mostly women and children, and the few survivors were shipped to Bermuda and sold into slavery. On the heels of the virgin-soil epidemics that had decimated the native population, the ghastly specter of genocide had reached the shores of America. In 1675, bloody King Phillip’s War put the finishing touches on what was more or less the total extermination of the eastern woodland Indians.

It is an inescapable fact, therefore, that this proud country was born in the aftermath of a shameful ethnic cleansing that is largely absent from the collective memory. It behooves us to refresh that memory. How would the current debate over immigration change, for example, if it were to be conducted in the light of a more honest consideration of our own deepest origins? Would self-righteous distinctions about “legal” vs. “illegal” immigrants have the same emotional currency? Recent popular histories such as Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower and Jill Lepore’s The Name of War have taken us some distance in this process of revision, but we need to keep telling ourselves the true story until it is enshrined in our national consciousness. It’s high time we updated the Thanksgiving Myth.

ummagumma.co:

Parental Lies

ummagumma.co:


(Source: par1138)

Why Conservatives Hate History

The facts destroy their mythology, that's why.

Sean McElwee at Salon:

American’s right wing, you see, is terrified of history because it is always sentimentalizing it. Many of its arguments rely on a feeling of nostalgia for “good old days,” that appeals almost exclusively to aging whites. That means that a more accurate history, one that considers groups that are traditionally marginalized — women, people of color, Native Americans, immigrants and the poor — don’t necessarily sit that well. Their stories, the stories of the downtrodden, crush the false narrative that many conservatives like to imagine — that of a idyllic past marred by the New Deal, women’s liberation and civil rights.

In Denver, a school board recently tried to limit the historical curriculum to only events that would, “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights.” Needless to say, much of American history — the Great Depression, the Trail of Tears and the internment of Japanese-Americans — would, under those parameters, need to obfuscated. The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, has issued a statement calling the new Advanced Placement U.S. History standards ”radically revisionist.” But conservatives may want to take the plank out of their own eye before examining the speck in their neighbors. Here are the most important distortions of history the right has promoted recently.

SNIP

There was a time when conservatism was a philosophy concerned primarily with wrestling with and understanding tradition and the limits of human reason and ability. However, these days conservatism is reactionary — it has been imbued with racism, conspiratorial thinking and a hyper-individualistic capitalism. Instead of questioning the limits of reason, it has jettisoned it. In its place remains free market dogma, bad Biblical interpretation and a sentimentalized past. In place of reason and argument, most conservatives rely on fantasy and reminiscence. Allowing conservatives to redefine the past will be incredibly harmful.

Tales

ummagumma.co:


(Source: majormakaber)