Dear Lord, Thank You for Placing In My Inbox Shit That Writes Itself. Amen.

click to embiggen

Because the Lord God sayeth that you can't pray for China unless you are wearing a cheap plastic bracelet produced by slave labor in China. Buy more-they'll be forced to work harder!!!!

If You Live in South Carolina, I Urge You to Buy the New "I Believe" License Plates

Florida couldn't do it, but by God and praise Jesus, South Carolina's legislature approved the controversial "I believe" license plates. Asked if he thought the plates were a violation of the separation of Church and State, South Carolina legislator and bill sponsor Lawrence K. Grooms said "I didn't see a constitutional problem with it". Deep reasoning indeed.

It seems that proceeds from the plates will not benefit any particular group, so I give the Wundrun seal of approval to these plates. Particularly if you would go out and buy customized license plate frames and decals to go with them. Here are some suggestions:

The original plateOptional Frames with illustrative decals:


As an aside: If you follow the link above to the story in the Christian Post, you'll find some hilarious christian comments.

Right off the bat Loretta49 gives my favorite "This is beautiful and wholesome idea that gives you and everyone around peace and spirituality and anyone who doesn't like it, is a freak with a psychologycal problem and needs to go a psychologist and do not bother people who enjoy their religion and the peace and happiness it brings."

Keep Dr. Dobson OUT of the Hall of Fame

Focus on the Family kindly sent me an e-mail letting me know that Dr. James Dobson is up for a National Radio Hall of Fame award. Would I kindly cast my vote?

Sure enough, and I would like to ask you to kindly do the same. Please pass this along to anyone you know who would also like to cast a vote against Dr. Dobson.

Dr. Dobson's fellow nominees are Bob Costas, Dr. Laura, and Howard Stern.

I briefly considered voting for Howard Stern, since having Stern defeat Dobson seems the most fitting, but I couldn't do it primarily because I despise Howard Stern. These days "misogynist" gets bandied about to the point of losing all meaning. Howard Stern fills up that empty-meaning cup and lets his demeaning drivel overflow.

I voted for Bob Costas. Mostly because he is the only professional the National Radio Hall of Fame put up for nomination this year anyway.

The whole thing seems rather sad. Nonetheless, if there is a God you will help to ensure that Dr. Dobson goes home from the banquet empty-handed and cursing the Lord who hath forsaken him.

Te he.

Here's the link. There's extra bullshitty signing up stuff involved, but remember: it's us against the fundies. You know they'll all be working hard to get him in. They won't let a little registration whoo-ha stop them. Go the extra mile. Tell your friends. Start a campaign. Tell 'em Jess sent you.

In the Whatever Happened To...Column

I am so glad that the Philadelphia Inquirer signed Rick Santorum on as a columnist. This way, we can continue to be amused at his batshit crazy fundamentalist logic. I mean, what's Mark Foley been up to? Who knows?

Now that California has said that creating separate language in the state constitution for a group of individuals amounts to discrimination, thus opening the doors for gay marriage, Rick is all 'uh hum, toldya the world would end' in his Inky column.

I plucked some bon mots:

First, he says his alarm! went unheeded. It's right in the title:

The Elephant in the Room: A wake-up call on gay marriage after '03 alarm went unheeded

One could just say you lost, Rick.

He says:

Five years later, do I regret sounding the alarm about marriage? No.

I'm just saddened that time has proved right those of us who worried about the future of marriage as the union of husband and wife, deeply rooted not only in our traditions, our faiths, but in the facts of human nature: as Pope Benedict said, "The cradle of life and love," connecting mothers and fathers to their children.

Okay, he's upfront in admitting that his notion of what is marriage comes from his faith. But then, get this and try not to giggle, he says that it's due to the facts of human nature that only men and only women should marry. His source? An anthropolgist? A genetic scientist? A biologist (known to Santorum as a Darwinist, btw). Nope. The Pope. Yeah, all us non-religious types who believe in equality and separation of church and state should look to that man of science and reason for our stand on human nature. The Pope. Who, I don't think, gets peer reviewed.

Then he raises the clouding of a spurious correlation to a high art. In Norway, he says, gay marriage was legalized in 1990 and then all hell broke loose. (If it's Norway, does that mean that Hell has frozen over? Just Wondering^TM)

Look at Norway. It began allowing same-sex marriage in the 1990s. In just the last decade, its heterosexual-marriage rates have nose-dived and its out-of-wedlock birthrate skyrocketed to 80 percent for firstborn children. Too bad for those kids who probably won't have a dad around, but we can't let the welfare of children stand in the way of social affirmation, can we?

How is this related to gay marriage? I haven't the foggiest idea and Santorum doesn't bother to explain. How does he know these children are growing up without father? Maybe some of them are growing up with two dads? Further, does he really want to use Norway as an example of a place where they suffer the little children? Norway has, since adopting the gay marriage law also raised itself to the top spot in standard of living among all countries of the world - a feat it has been repeating year after year. Since adopting the gay marriage law, Norway's infant mortality rate has steadily dropped every year. It currently stands at 3.64/1000 births compared to the US who's rate is 6.4/1000.

Okay, but that's the disingenuous part. What of the batshit crazy stuff? Well lookie here:

But what about love? That's the question a student asked this winter when I spoke at Georgetown University.

Is anyone saying same-sex couples can't love each other? I love my children. I love my friends, my brother. Heck, I even love my mother-in-law. Should we call these relationships marriage, too? Marriage is and always has been more than the acknowledgment of the love between two people.

What about the constitutional right to equal protection under the law? Marriage is not an inalienable right; it is a privilege, a license granted by government conferring certain governmental benefits.

There is a constitutional right that is under threat: the free exercise of religion.

Let me go out on another limb here and make another crazy prediction. Within 10 years, clergy will be sued or indicted for preaching on certain Bible passages dealing with homosexuality and churches, and church-related organizations will lose government contracts and even their tax-exempt status.

Wha? Where to begin?

Let's look at Santorum's Syllogism, shall we? (As if he didn't get enough abuse from his man-on-dog comments)

I love my brother. Marriage=Love. Therefore I have married my brother

I know the Appalachians run up through Pennsylvania, Rick. But really.

He rightly assigns the governance of marriage to the government. It is after all the government that issues the license. But then he goes on to say that it's a privilege. Then he collapses all sanity by saying that only the government is allowed to confer privilege on people and it can do so by saying which ones deserve the privilege. Which is exactly the point the Supreme Court of California made.

Going into foaming at the mouth mode, he claims that if two people in California get married my free expression of religion is going to be infringed upon. Again, we don't get the mechanics of how this works. Yes, if my religion says that I'm going to hell for casting my eyes upon an elderly gay couple sitting in a hospital room kissing each other goodbye on the day that death do them part, then yeah. But what kind of religion is that? Makes you want to run to your nearest atheist temple and lie prostrate upon the ground, doesn't it? Oh, I kid. There are no atheist temples. Maybe universities, or libraries, or possibly Unitarian churches. But we're not much into organization.

Then he says he's going to make a crazy prediction. (Oh, Rick? They've all been crazy, this isn't your first). All of his predictions center around Churches losing their federal advantages for promoting bigotry. And my response is: yeah, so?

Here's the deal. If you want to have a church that doesn't allow gay marriage go right ahead. But do it without the federal grants and the federal tax exemptions. In other words, religions, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. No one says you have to go out of existence. We're just saying our tax dollars don't have to support you.

That's a position you ought to understand.

Shame on Ben Stein

All cultures have their creation myths - the ancient Egyptians believed that the god Atum, deity of the solar disk and the sun itself, masturbated himself, exploding a life-giving burst of energy that seeded the dark unformed void with countless galazies. In the land of the pyramids there was no impropriety in the concept that 'self abuse' created the universe, although millennia later Victorian archaeologists wer predictably shocked to the core by the ancient Egyptians' melding of sex and divinity.

In the first act of creation, Aten was perceived as an androgynous figure, the hand that made the world being the female aspect, while his phallus represented the equal and opposite male principle. As the eminent American scholar Professor Karl Luckert writes: 'The entire system can be visualized as a flow of creative vitality, emanating outward from the godhead, thinning out as it flows further from the source.'

However, this apparently primitive - if somewhat explicit - tale actually encompasses a highly sophisticated understanding of the cosmology...It literally describes the 'Big Bang', in which all matter explodes from a point of singularity and then expands and unfolds, becoming more complex as fundamental forces come into being and interact, finally reaching the level of elemental matter.

-From Lynn Picknett's Secret History of Lucifer.

Ben Stein has a new movie coming out. Seeing the trailer I thought that maybe the movie was a gentle castigation of his comrades on the right who persist in their victim fantasies and pout about how schools don't teach their religion. Well, flip that on its head.

Stein's movie 'Expelled' is a screed against science, though the people who work in science related industries, laboratories and classrooms are not labeled 'scientists' by Stein. They are 'Darwinists'. I guess that's probably all you need to know to ascertain that there won't be much even-handed discussion of the current debate between science (particularly any science related to evolution) versus intelligent design.

Though the movie's not out yet, its producers have invited people like Richard Dawkins and the editorial board of Scientific American to preview it. According to John Rennie at Scientific American

No one could have been more surprised than I when the producers called, unbidden, offering Scientific American's editors a private screening. Given that our magazine's positions on evolution and intelligent design (ID) creationism reflect those of the scientific mainstream (that is, evolution: good science; ID: not science), you have to wonder why they would bother. It's not as though anything in Expelled would have been likely to change our views. And they can't have been looking for a critique of the science in the movie, because there isn't much to speak of.

Rather, it seems a safe bet that the producers hope a whipping from us would be useful for publicity: further proof that any mention of ID outrages the close-minded establishment. (Picture Ben Stein as Jack Nicholson, shouting, "You can't handle the truth!") Knowing this, we could simply ignore the movie—which might also suit their purposes, come to think of it.

A quick look at the Expelled website shows Rennie has pegged their motivation. Headlines show a particular taunting of Dawkins, not even worth looking into. You can guess what's there.

Wouldn't you think that a movie that is all about how Intelligent Design isn't being given its props as a science might try to spend a little time trying to establish its own scientific underpinnings? You and I might. I don't understand why Stein doesn't. It's as if he has a stake in the dumbing down of America.

Alonzo Fyfe, who writes the blog "The Atheist Ethicist" begins his open letter of critique to Stein of the movie (which he acknowledges not to have seen) this way:

I want to begin by pointing that your legacy, as a result of your work on this particular project, will be the suffering and early death of countless people who otherwise could have been saved or benefited from advances in science.

No punches pulled there.

Fyfe offers up such a simple rebuttal to the nonsense that intelligent design has to be accepted as science in our schools and colleges:

I am going to have to say something about the nature of science to demonstrate this point. Science is involved in explaining and predicting real-world events. This includes real-world events that cause real-world death and suffering. The better we are at understanding the real world, the better we will be at avoiding the death and suffering that nature would otherwise inflict on us.

Science does this by comparing theories. Theory A predicts that under conditions C, that R will result. Theory B predicts that under conditions C, S will result. Scientists then set up or observe conditions C, and see if they detect R or S. If they detect R, they go with theory A. If they detect S, they go with Theory B. [snip]

Now, please, try for me to put the concept of intelligent design into the description that I wrote above about how to compare scientific theories. Come up with a condition C, and a result R1 or R2, that will tell us whether or not to accept Theory A or Theory B, where Theory B is intelligent design.

You will fail.

No scientist has yet been able to present a “Theory B” that includes a God variable that produces more accurate results under Conditions C than any comparable theory that lacks a God variable.

If it seems that Fyfe is over-the-top in saying that Stein's Expelled will lead to human suffering consider that one of Stein's claims in the movie is that 'Darwinism' led to the Holocaust!

The movie claims to show several Americans who have been persecuted for trying to bring about an open and honest debate between intelligent design and evolution. The problem is that in each case major parts of the victims case are left out.

Rennie describes the situation of one such victim:

Expelled then trots out some of the people whom it claims have been persecuted by the Darwinist establishment. First among them is Richard Sternberg*, former editor of the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, who published an article on ID by Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute. Sternberg tells Stein that he subsequently lost his editorship, his old position at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and his original office. Looking a bit smug in his self-martyrdom, Sternberg also reports that a colleague compared him with an "intellectual terrorist."

What most viewers of Expelled may not realize—because the film doesn't even hint at it—is that Sternberg's case is not quite what it sounds. Biologists criticized Sternberg's choice to publish the paper not only because it supported ID but also because Sternberg approved it by himself rather than sending it out for independent expert review. He didn't lose his editorship; he published the paper in what was already scheduled to be his last issue as editor. He didn't lose his job at the Smithsonian; his appointment there as an unpaid research associate had a limited term, and when it was over he was given a new one. His office move was scheduled before the paper ever appeared.

Michael Schermer who is the publisher of Skeptic and who is interviewed for the movie says that the film opens with Stein giving a lecture to a group of enthusiastic Pepperdine students who adoringly approve of his anti-evolutionary jeremiad. Problem: those students presented on the film are extras. The film production company paid for the use of the auditorium and filled it with paid shills. A provost at the university estimates that there may have been three or four actual students in attendance.


Shermer's article describes what it was like to be interviewed for this movie. I don't need to go into it. You can guess that it involved being duped. I would encourage you to read it.



Back to our jack-off theory of the origin of the cosmos: If Stein is really interested in promoting the idea that God created the universe maybe we should press him to explain why, with thousands and thousands of creation theories to choose from, we can't accept the early Egyptians as true science. It melds much more closely with actual scientific theory than the story that goes 'And God said...'.

Just wondering.

P.S. for a beautiful take on the cosmos by my favorite mathmetician head over to mattyboy's ponderance of the galaxies

UPDATE: PZ Meyers at Pharyngula has asked that bloggers post a link to the site that is devoted to debunking the movie so that it moves up in technorati and google authoritay. Here is that link . Click away like you're Atum creating the universe, my friends!

Wiccans Jailed for Child Abuse

WESTON, Wis. —
An 11-year-old girl died after her parents used incantations for healing rather than seek medical help for a treatable form of diabetes, police said Tuesday.

Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin said Madeline Neumann died Sunday.

"She got sicker and sicker until she was dead," he said.

Vergin said an autopsy determined the girl died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body, and she had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness.

The girl's parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to "choosing the wrong spell," the police chief said.

They believed the key to healing "was it was better to expand the Coven's circle . Call more people to help produce the proper magic," he said.

The mother believes the girl could still be resurrected, the police chief said.

-----------------------------

The girl has three siblings, ranging in age from 13 to 16, the police chief said.

The siblings are being immediately removed from the home due to abuse.

Okay that's not really the story. The above story is true but the religion in question is Christianity. Here's the real story.

WESTON, Wis. —
An 11-year-old girl died after her parents prayed for healing rather than seek medical help for a treatable form of diabetes, police said Tuesday.

Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin said Madeline Neumann died Sunday.

"She got sicker and sicker until she was dead," he said.

Vergin said an autopsy determined the girl died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body, and she had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness.

The girl's parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to "apparently they didn't have enough faith," the police chief said.

They believed the key to healing "was it was better to keep praying. Call more people to help pray," he said.

The mother believes the girl could still be resurrected, the police chief said.

Telephone messages left at the Neumann home by The Associated Press were not immediately returned.

The family does not attend an organized church or participate in an organized religion, Vergin said. "They have a little Bible study of a few people."

The parents told investigators their daughter last saw a doctor when she was 3 to get some shots, Vergin said. The girl had attended public school during the first semester but didn't return for the second semester.

Officers went to the home after one of the girl's relatives in California called police to check on her, Vergin said. She was taken to a hospital where she was pronounced dead.

The relative was fearful the girl was "extremely ill, dire," Vergin said.

The girl has three siblings, ranging in age from 13 to 16, the police chief said.

"They are still in the home," he said. "There is no reason to remove them. There is no abuse or signs of abuse that we can see."

The girl's death remains under investigation and the findings will be forwarded to the district attorney to review for possible charges, the chief said.

The family operates a coffee shop in Weston, which is a suburb of Wausau, Vergin said.

I apologize to any Wiccans I may have offended. I also think that if the girl were muslim we'd have seen an outcry to remove the other children from the home, or to at least get social services involved.

Alert the "Bong Hits for Jesus" Kid

This is about legislation in Oklahoma. Good luck getting into good colleges, young Okies. (And by "Good" I do not mean Bob Jones or Liberty.)

From the Edmond Sun:

The bill requires public schools to guarantee students the right to express their religious viewpoints in a public forum, in class, in homework and in other ways without being penalized. If a student’s religious beliefs were in conflict with scientific theory, and the student chose to express those beliefs rather than explain the theory in response to an exam question, the student’s incorrect response would be deemed satisfactory, according to this bill.

The school would be required to reward the student with a good grade, or be considered in violation of the law. Even simple, factual information such as the age of the earth (4.65 billion years) would be subject to the student’s belief, and if the student answered 6,000 years based on his or her religious belief, the school would have to credit it as correct. Science education becomes absurd under such a situation.

Bass Practice

Jesus sent me this video. We're like, total im bff's.

What do you get when you cross mattyboy and Franiam?

Lolzchristians, that's what!





Also, while I am making fun o' the fundies (you're not a fundie, Franiam I did not mean to imply...), I thought I might pass along my score on the "How Good of a Christian Are You", written by someone who writes like a LOLZ christian:

Putting the 'Fun' back into crazy fundies

From the NY Times

Many christian churches are using the violent video game Halo 3 to lure teens and young men back to church.

Those buying [Halo 3] must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out
----
Once they come for the games, Gregg Barbour, the youth minister of the church said, they will stay for his Christian message. “We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour wrote in a letter to parents at the church.
-----
“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”

The article goes on to say that James Dobson's Focus on the Family doesn't yet have an opinion on the controversy. What, God's not talking to you today, Jimmy?

Blackwater has been banned from Iraq

From CNN:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraq's Interior Ministry has revoked the license of Blackwater USA, an American security firm whose contractors are blamed for a Sunday gunbattle in Baghdad that left eight civilians dead.

Sunday's firefight took place near Nusoor Square, an area that straddles the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Mansour and Yarmouk.

In addition to the fatalities, 14 people were wounded, most of them civilians, the official said.
....

"We have revoked Blackwater's license to operate in Iraq. As of now they are not allowed to operate anywhere in the Republic of Iraq," Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf said Monday. "The investigation is ongoing, and all those responsible for Sunday's killing will be referred to Iraqi justice."

Blackwater is one of many security firms contracted by the U.S. government during the Iraq war. An estimated 25,000-plus employees of private security firms are working in Iraq, guarding diplomats, reconstruction workers and government officials. As many as 200 are believed to have been killed on the job, according to U.S. congressional reports
......
Iraqi authorities have issued previous complaints about shootings by private military contractors, but Iraqi courts do not have the authority to bring contractors to trial, according to a July report from the Congressional Research Service.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee estimated in February that nearly $4 billion had been spent on security contracts amid the insurgency that followed the U.S. invasion in 2003 -- costs that have forced the delay, cancellation or scaling back of some reconstruction projects.

Note that the number given of 25,000 contractors are for those involved in security functions only. The rest of the 180,000 contractors in Iraq are the food service workers, the sanitation workers, the truck drivers and the like.

It will be interesting to follow this development. I somehow doubt that Blackwater will in the end actually leave Iraq. But I am a pessimist when it comes to Christian Fundamentalist whack-jobs, accountability and this administration. (Blackwater is owned by a fundie with 'loofah my back, please George' closeness to the president).

If they should leave, I would think that things would be better for our own troops and for the Iraqi people.

How did George Bush steal my Jesus?

It sounds strange to say it this way, but if Al Gore had won Bush v. Gore, I would probably still be a believer. Maybe not a Catholic, me n' the pope were not exactly seeing eye to eye by then--a little dust up over an annulment and the rules for baptizing babies with or without said annulment-- but I think I'd still be somewhere in the Christian community.

And I was still a Christian through the first term of the Bush Administration. But on November 3, 2004 I sat at my computer, cried, and read through the election stories and kept coming across 'values voters'.

The idea that the only moral vote was one for George Bush was absolutely confounding to me. I had to find my bible and read the New Testament to find these mysterious passages that rang the clarion of God's anger against homosexuals and unwanted pregnancies.

There was a slight problem: I couldn't find my bible. I had the Catholic issue, given to me by my aunt twenty years before as a confirmation gift. We moved the year before the election and most of my books were still in boxes in the basement. (Still are, actually). I went to Barnes and Noble to buy a new bible and what a trip that was. How could it be that I couldn't find a bible that resembled my old confirmation bible? What were these bibles that used hip, updated text? Who was TNIV? How can anyone believe the infallibility of the bible when there are so many bibles to choose from? I eeny-meeny-miny-moed a selection and went home determined to actually read it.

Being raised a Catholic means never having to read the bible. You get the relevant parts read to you in three year cycles. The rest, meh. What I read in Today's New International Version of the bible was a little surprising. I found myself disagreeing with Jesus on a few points.

This began my search for information on how maybe we've misinterpreted Jesus. I read Elaine Pagels, books about the gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene. I devoured books on the gnostics. I read A. N. Wilson's book about the apostle Paul.

All my studying led to one very clear conclusion: I had stopped believing in Jesus.

I sometimes envy people for whom religion is not important. My husband is that way. I have dragged him to all manner of different churches and different denominations trying to find our fit. He never complained about going, and didn't really care what denomination we were visiting which week. I think he's happier now that I have no demands on his Sunday morning time. He uses it to fly fish. I can't sit on a fence. If I'm going to have faith then I'm going to have it, understand it, participate in it. Once I climbed over the fence from the land of superstition and became an immigrant to the land of reason it was impossible to go back.

I mentioned that George Bush stole my Jesus on the comments of an atheist website. Someone replied that no one can steal what you don't want. It's true, my faith was always one of more questions than answers. The president didn't really steal my religion. It was more like he helped me clean out my closets.