Author Archives: Jacob Fortin

Catholic School Board Chair compares LGBT group to Nazis

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I’m exhausted with all the crazy bigotry and homophobia coming out of every conceivable Catholic institution. They simply refuse to accept the fact some human beings have a sexual attraction to members of the same gender. Of course, they all deny their obvious homophobia and assume it’s society that has the problem, not them. Clearly, these aren’t the kind of folks who are accustomed to accepting objective reality.

So imagine my utter disgust when I read a Catholic school in Ontario, Canada not only refused to allow a Gay-Straight Alliance club to exist on school grounds, but had one of the board chairs (an ignorant and spiteful woman named Alice Anne LeMay) compare LGBT students to Nazis:

We don’t have Nazi groups either,” she mused in an interview with Canadian LGBT publication Xtra!. “Gay-straight alliances are banned because they are not within the teachings of the Catholic Church.”

To be fair, had there been a Nazi group, they might have had more luck getting sanctioned; let’s not forget the Vatican signed an agreement with Hitler’s regime that made them the official religion of Germany. So technically speaking, I guess Nazism is more in line with the teaching of Catholicism than tolerance, compassion and understanding.

Somalian Town bans opposite sex handshakes

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You’d think a town in Somalia would have more important things to deal with than the explosive sexual danger of inter-gender handshakes…apparently not:

Men and women have been banned from shaking hands in a district of Somalia controlled by the Islamist group al-Shabab. Under the ban imposed in the southern town of Jowhar, men and women who are not related are also barred from walking together or chatting in public.

It is the first time such social restrictions have been introduced.

The al-Shabab administration said those who disobeyed the new rules would be punished according to Sharia law. The BBC’s Mohamed Moalimuu in Mogadishu says the penalty would probably be a public flogging.

Being Arrogant doesn’t mean you’re wrong

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I’ve recently been enjoying Greta Christina’s rather elaborate and lengthy blog posts over at Alternet.org, and I’ve been REALLY enjoying the debate her articles seem to generate in the comment section. Unlike our safe atheist-only environment we’re accustomed to, Alternet seems to be populated by an eclectic mix of believers, atheists and agnostics.

I was particularly fascinated with some of the comments generated in her recent article entitled “Why Are Believers So Hostile Toward Atheists?”. While Greta argued atheists are damned if we do, and damned if we don’t, her readers appear to have jumped on the “atheists are arrogant” argument as a way of sidestepping the issues:

Atheists (of the herd variety) are typically condescending and arrogant. They often cite ways in which non-atheists are ill-educated, stupid, irrational or misinformed. All based on the implicit paradoxical faith of the herd-atheist’s belief in no god. Of course this is sensed as a hostile stance. Which, of course, induces a hostile response.
There’s something strange and paradoxical about atheism. It’s a faith system who’s sole purpose is to deny something that isn’t defined. It’s a faith system rather than a rational system because, the thing that is denied isn’t defined. If it’s not defined, then it can’t be subject to logic. For the sake of logic, “god” is just a meaningless sound until it’s defined. And there are uncountable definitions that could be made for “god”. And not all those possible definitions can be subject to logic (naturally, considering the scope of what the word “god” suggests). So, atheism is just another kind of religion.

So this person is arguing because a proper definition of God doesn’t exist, it’s irrational not to believe in it? See, this might be a clue to why people are condescending to you, buddy. Terrible arguments don’t make you a lot of friends on the Internet.

Whilst I am a non-believer, I actually find myself partly in agreement with you:

1. I have observed many Atheists in this place to be “condescending and arrogant”, and I’d add even darn right hostile and rude towards Theists.
2. I agree Atheism is a kind of “faith” in as much as it is a position that defies any hard evidence to support their oft claimed scientific position, only that those who support it have not witnessed anything that suggests to them there is a God.

Well, at least this guy is proof not every nonbeliever knows what the fuck they’re talking about. While I agree to the charge of hostility, I think the reader missed the point Greta was trying to make; mainly that our anger is directed at the way religionists treat their fellow believers, and not ourselves. As for the argument it’s “faith” to have a healthy skepticism towards an unfalsifiable and improvable God, I don’t know what will convince someone this profoundly confused that rejecting a poor hypothesis is NOT tantamount to faith.

I have been verbally assaulted on several forums by atheists who are offended by my faith. My response is always kind. It doesn’t seem to soften up their anger. I really don’t understand why the atheists are so afraid of Christians.

The simple answer to this question would include things like: The Inquisition, the Crusades, the Reconquista, and the French Wars of Religion to name a few. The more complex answer would be we fear anyone who bases their entire lives on The Bible or any other violent, misogynistic and xenophobic book. Beliefs can be scary things.

Greta, why are you making sweeping generalizations about a group of people? I would have thought that you of all people would know that sweeping generalizations are almost always false. I’ve met very happy, kind Christians and Believers who could care less about Atheists, and even those who are perfectly happy to socialize with their Atheist friends. And of course, I’ve met many rabid Atheists who are Hostile Toward Believers. Your arguments are getting worse all the time. Now you’ve degenerated into making sweeping generalizations about a group of people as an easy, simplistic way of portraying them in a bad light. I wonder: Why is Greta Christina so Hostile Toward Believers?

I know we treat the word “generalizing” as some kind of pariah, but it’s often really the only way to make statements about the world that have any merit. If I say “most human beings are friendly”, it’s a pretty broad generalization, and there are plenty of examples why this isn’t true. Still, we expect there to be exceptions to the rule. There are theists who aren’t hostile towards atheists and nonbelievers, but so what? Does it suddenly mean there’s no hostility to speak of?

You know, after reading all the comments on her blog posts, I hope she’s getting paid decently for this gig. The amount of baseless criticism for her innocuous article would test my fucking patience to its limits. What do you guys think?

Pakistan governor murdered over Blasphemy Law reform

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Imagine your loved one gets gunned down for trying to reform a law that makes the lives of people visibly worse, and the murderer is showered with rose petals and celebrated for his actions? Well, for that to happen, you’d have to be in Pakistan, and the law you would have to try and reform would be the blasphemy kind.

Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, was attempting to reform the laws in an effort to avoid sentencing people like Asia Bibi to death of for the “crime” of speaking a dead Arab’s name in vain, and as a result, he was murdered. Hated among the hardliners, many of his fellow politicians issued statements claiming his murder was totally justified:

Jamaat-e-Islami, one of Pakistan’s main Islamist political parties, also said Mr Taseer’s assassination was justified. “If the government had removed him from the governorship, there wouldn’t have been the need for someone to shoot him,” it said in a statement.

It doesn’t even look like the people who were supposed to protect him had much interest in doing so:

Pictures of his smiling face dominated the local newspapers, which questioned why five other police protection officers allowed him to pump 40 bullets into Mr Taseer’s body.

40 bullets? I guess the 5 police officers protecting him were out having a coffee break or something.

Do I need to remind everyone Pakistan possesses a nuclear arsenal? Doesn’t it comfort you to know primitive, violent and superstitious morons are in control of devices which are the culmination of our scientific understanding of the Universe?

Child Abuse victim’s lawyer claims lawsuit money

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A Portland, Oregon man identified only as G.B. has yet to see a penny of the $900,000 suit he won for being molested by Rev. Thomas Laughlin. The Church isn’t actually to blame for this: his lawyer charged him over 870k for his services, and G.B. hasn’t even received the remaining $23,000 that was left over. So basically, while this poor man tries to survive off $400 dollars a month from his disability payments, his piece of shit lawyers got away with robbing him blind.

The story of what happened is fairly complicated (so I won’t go into it), and is a testament to the fact there are blood sucking lawyers (no offense to fans who do this as a profession) out there, often with far too much leeway into what they can charge and how they control settlement monies.

Some local attorneys are upset because this story will only hurt their reputation. Considering how bad it is now, I’m not sure there is anything they can do to convince us they are anything but parasites on our society, exploiting naïve or powerless individuals who don’t have the same understanding of the law they do.

It seems no one cared the entire reason for the suit was for G.B. to benefit from at least some financial compensation for his terrible ordeal. Everyone was too busy trying to “get paid”. Can you have a bigger ethical “fail” moment (apart from the actual molestation, that is)?

Hitch’s little brother is religious

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This may surprise you, but it turns out Christopher Hitchens’ little brother is religious. So religious in fact he wrote a book called The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith. It’s basically a repudiation (heh) of his big bro’s book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and it argues religion keeps shaky civilizations from collapsing (maybe on Opposite Day) and prevents the horrors of utopianism as seen through communist regimes such as Russia and China.

The first half of the video is spent showing his accomplishment dick is just as big as his brother Christopher’s, and then around the 4 minute mark he starts talking about his conversion (“I realized one day I might be judged”), his relationship with his brother (not good, considering their father’s deathbed attempt to reconcile them), and his thoughts on atheism’s shortcomings.

It’s an interesting glance into the Hitchens family and the cool things they have all accomplished. You can read a pretty thorough breakdown of his book and the claims he makes on its wiki page. It’s a pretty good way to dust up on the newest style of attacks from religious people, aka the myth that ‘Atheism would do it worse.’

Jesus wants to give you Hepatitis

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When you’re a Catholic priest, one of your supposed powers is the ability to transform wine into the blood of your dead Savior. This supposed divine skill is called “transubstantiation”, and it’s about the lamest power you could confer on anyone. I’ve always been surprised parishioners believe this happens, since they should be able to tell it’s definitely wine they are drinking during Communion. I guess you can’t under-estimate the power of delusion.

The other problem with the whole act of Communion: everyone is drinking from the same cup. It sounds like a gigantic health hazard, and surprise: it turns out a few hundred people in New York may have contracted Hepatitis A during Christmas Mass.

So what are the symptoms of Hep A?

While hepatitis A often has no visible symptoms in children, in adults it often exhibits itself in the form of flu-like symptoms. Other symptoms include tiredness, nausea, vomiting, pain in the right upper quadrant of the abdomen, jaundice, dark-colored urine and, in severe cases, liver failure.

Wow, that sounds like it sucks hard. Surely there must be a treatment for this other than praying, right?

There is no treatment for hepatitis A once one has developed the infection, though if you know you’ve been exposed, Mahan recommends getting a vaccine promptly

The Lord works in mysterious ways!

Conservapedia proves Atheists are Fatty Fattersons

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Oh Conservapedia, you’re the gift that keeps on giving. We recently donated some money to Wikipedia, the reality-based crowd sourced encyclopedia, so I suppose it’s only ‘fair and balanced’ we give its right wing la-la land equivalent some love too in the form of a post. On its front page next to such fine articles as “Is Barack Hussein Obama a president, or is he a dictator?” and “More than a thousand scientists have issued a report calling man-made global warming what it actually is: a fraud” sits the Article of the Month: “Atheism and obesity”

Amongst other things, this article says:

  • non-religious are more prone to being obese than very religious individuals (sounds like someone needs a lesson on causality)
  • gluttony is a sin, hence why very religious people are skinnier (and poorer, right?)
  • look at how fat the American Atheists board of directors, PZ Myers, Christopher Hitchens, and lesbians are (for more on that last one, check out conservapedia’s helpful ‘Lesbians and Obesity’ article)
  • atheists get married less often, probably because they’re fat fucks
  • atheists are more likely to kill themselves, again, because a life with gut instead of God is too horrible to bear

The article really is great for lols, but just in case you’re sitting there worried your non-belief is making you fatter, here’s the crux of why this whole thing is dumb: according to the Gallup poll this is all based on, the ‘fat unbeliever’ group makes up 29.7% of the population. You may be surprised atheism has grown so much recently, considering official numbers put the atheist population in the US at somewhere around 6%.

The reason for this sudden quadruple growth in our numbers? Gallup considers anyone where “Religion is not an important part of daily life and church/synagogue/mosque attendance occurs seldom or never.” as part of the 29.7%. Seems to me that definition allows a pretty huge number of fat / lazy believers to get lumped in with us atheists.

The Pink Swastika

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Leave it to fundamentalist Christians to completely rewrite history to serve their own ends. I recommend you check out this article  about a book by evangelical loon named Scott Lively called “The Pink Swastika“. Scott is the president of the ultra conservative “Abiding Truth Ministries” who describes himself as “one of the most knowledgeable opponents of the homosexual agenda in America”. He’s also one of the unbelievably evil pieces of shit behind the “kill the gays” bill in Uganda. You could not have a more sinister opponent than this man.

He’s got some real gems in his book; specifically, he believes that Nazism was really a homofascist conspiracy, claiming Hitler’s top men were really bottoms. Of course, Scotty doesn’t need to bother with having to prove his insane claim: he just has to constantly repeat his lie until some idiot believes him.

“While we cannot say that homosexuals caused the Holocaust, we must not ignore their central role in Nazism,” the authors write. “To the myth of the ‘pink triangle’ — the notion that all homosexuals in Nazi Germany were persecuted — we must respond with the reality of the ‘pink swastika.”

I’m sick and tired of Christians accusing Nazis of being everything BUT Christians. What was the slogan emblazoned on the belts of the SS soldiers who whisked away Jews, gays, the mentally handicapped, and countless other minorities into the gas chambers? “God is on our side”. It’s a fucking fact the majority of Nazis were Christians. Of course they were; Germany was a heavily Christian country at the time, and their antisemitism was a direct consequence of their religion (remember that the charge of “Jewish Decide”, blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus, was only revoked by the Vatican in the 1960′s). Yet conservatives want people to assume fascism is a conspiracy of the left rather than one of the right, all to divert attention away from the fact that it’s much closer to their end of the political spectrum. The fact that the religious tend to be completely ignorant of world history makes books like “The Pink Swastika” the successes that they are.

We can’t let these revisionist liars continue to spew their hatred without consequence. We need to shame these morons before they brainwash their ignorant religious zombies into believing their ludicrous revisionist history. We cannot let fuckers like Scott and his ilk try and re-brand history to and whitewash the culpability of their faith in the murder of millions of innocents.

Utlra-Orthodox Jews wear grab that offends in protest

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You can always count on Ultra-Orthodox Jews to do something crazy. If they aren’t busy showing up at a Holocaust denier conference, they’re harassing little girls for dressing “immodestly”. All of this bad press has intensified resentment for these fundamentalist weirdos, so in an effort to fight this image problem, they decided to parade around town in uniforms similar to the ones worn by Jews in concentration camps.

Demonstrating against what they viewed as incitement against the ultra-Orthodox in Israeli media, about 1,000 men marched through the streets of their neighborhood, many of them dressed in concentration camp uniforms and wearing yellow Stars of David, which Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Well, that should convince everyone that you aren’t a bunch of out-of-touch, religious douche-bags without a clue.

I admire this woman

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It takes guts to stand up to Muslims and tell them their faith is hopelessly antiquated, backward, barbaric, and a threat to our modern values. It takes even more guts to do so when you’re an Arab. That’s why I’m in total admiration of this woman. How brave is she? How many of you would be willing to say what she said, in light of the danger it presents? That’s courage, folks!

Why do good things happen to bad people?

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Alright, the video is a little long, but it’s still entertaining, and he’s right in saying the answers to this fundamentally important question are all completely inadequate. I think theists should just admit if there is a God, he/she/it is certainly not “All Loving”. A simple look at Hell would quickly demonstrate that fact. No matter how cruel the real world is (with people and animals suffering untold pain), at least eventually it’s over. But in the supposed “supernatural” realm, pain supposedly continues for eternity. This is not the action of an all loving God, but rather those of a revenge-hungry maniac. Good thing it’s all bullshit, right?

Religious hospitals scare me

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I can’t imagine the kind of terror I would experience if I was a woman and suddenly was faced with a complication in my pregnancy at a Catholic Hospital. The Church’s dogma concerning abortion is one that causes the misery and death of countless women, all because they’re convinced babies are all miracles of a male God, and conclude abortionists are worse than child molesters (you can’t rape what doesn’t exist, right?). Scientifically though, a pregnancy is similar to being invaded by a parasite, and there are often cases where the life of the mother is in imminent peril.

In 2009, St. Joseph hospital was faced with a rapidly dying pregnant woman, and they did the only thing they could do to save her: they aborted the 11 week-old fetus:

The woman who underwent the procedure is in her 20s and had a history of abnormally high blood pressure when she learned of her pregnancy. After she was admitted to the hospital with worsening symptoms, doctors determined her risk of death was nearly 100 percent.

As a consequence, they were stripped of their “Catholic” status by their local Dungeon Master Bishop, and now the hospital is not allowed to celebrate Mass and other useless religious rituals.

That’s actually great news, since it means one more hospital won’t be making any decisions based on some ancient, ridiculous dogma. The fact there are even medical facilities run by experts in nonsense is disturbing: a hospital is a place of science, not superstition. The fact the staff was punished for doing what any other medical establishment would do is telling, isn’t it?

40% of Americans are creationist idiots

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Hey America, how do you know whether or not your public education system is failing? How about the fact almost half of your adult population is convinced the Earth is about as old as the Agrarian Revolution (when we went from hunters to farmers). Nice, huh? If you’re wondering what other Western country has such abysmally ignorant people, the answer is Turkey, a similarly religious country that also has a significant portion of its population swearing fealty to an anthropomorphic God.

The rest is divided into two categories: about 38% think that God directed evolution (proving only these folks know slightly less than nothing about the process). The good news (yes, there’s a slight sliver of hope) is the percentage of Americans who think Evolution has only a secular explanation went from 9% to 16%, demonstrating the hard work of smart people is starting to pay off. While it would be impossible to shift that 40% anytime soon, if we can convince the remaining 38% who aren’t completely retarded that God is merely an invention of our deluded minds and has no business in science, we’d actually be a slight majority.

Until that fucking “miracle” happens, however, you can feel proud no first world country would boast this kind of pathetically low score when it comes to scientific awareness. So if you want to be #1 at something, America, you can always take the prize of “Most Ignorant Modern Country in the World”. Congrats, y’all!