Are you seriously going on camera, with that scarf, and think we’re going to be fooled into thinking you’ve successfully “turned straight”? The way I see it, you can either learn to deal with your love for pole and recognize the Bible is just a bunch of nonsensical fairy tales, or you can continue to be miserable and feel like a sinful piece of shit for the rest of your life. Which one sounds the most fun, honestly?
Author Archives: Jacob Fortin
What kind of God would destroy His Styrofoam son?
The San Francisco Chronicle’s website has a hilarious column detailing 19 reasons why God allowed Touchdown Jesus to burn last week. Here’s some of my favorites:
6) The real Jesus of historical record, being a grizzled, husky, musky, dark-skinned Jew with short, curly black hair who rarely showered and smelled of goat droppings and dried sweat, and who had a thing for screaming random prophesies in the streets and talking about doom, fire and the unbearable hotness of Mary Magdalene, well, the real Jesus’ spirit has been quite displeased with being eternally depicted as a pale, soft-focus blond European hippie in bleached-out robes who likes to give lots of there-there-now hugs while watching professional sports. Basta.
10) Word has it the Hustler Hollywood sign sitting atop the adult bookstore across the street from the torched Touchdown Jesus was left unscathed, thus proving (once again) that God really does like porn. And irony. Or just needs a new contact lens prescription.
12) Really, who doesn’t like to watch fundamentalists scurry about in a baffled frenzy, unsure what it all might mean, vowing to rebuild the tacky roadside hellbeast in honor of, well, of not really understanding much about divinity, or art, or how nature works? Not God, that’s who.
13) Thor had had just about enough.
14) Correction: Zeus.
Pakistan authorities want Facebook founder’s head
You may not like some of the things Mark Zuckerberg has done to Facebook (especially their fucked up lack of privacy), but I doubt most of you are seriously considering hurting this dude. Then again, you aren’t the government of Pakistan, which seems intent on trying to prosecute the goofy CEO for his involvement in hosting the “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” Facebook page.
It’s become pretty clear the West’s concept of free speech is in direct opposition to Islam’s powerful insecurities about itself. The whole point of the exercise was to show exactly how intolerant, stupid, and violent this religion is. So far, it’s succeeded brilliantly.
If you think I’m making this shit up, just check out Pakistan’s Section 295-C of their penal code:
Use of derogatory remark etc, in respect of the Holy Prophet, whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable for fine.
Wait, they kill you AND fine you for disparaging their prophet? Are they going to come and collect the money posthumously, or are you expected to pay for your own execution? That’s cold, man!
Touchdown Jesus hit by lightning, burns to the ground
It’s a miracle! The One True God has finally revealed himself to us, and has decided to show his complete disapproval of idolatry by burning the effigy of some 2000 year old Jewish hippie with his Zeus lightning. It’s clear from this random disaster that “He” would much prefer his proper form to be represented by a thin, partially charred stick figure. Truly his form is both magnificent and thankfully easy to draw!
Oh shit, apparently they’re rebuilding that Jesus monstrosity this summer. Do they not see the writing on the wall? If I believed that natural disasters were the result of an anthropomorphic deity’s anxieties, would it not be normal to conclude that perhaps remaking this gaudy eye-sore isn’t entirely wise? Hey, here’s an idea: make the next version fireproof!
The Perils of Lesbianity
A quick video detailing how evil lesbians spread their ways.
People need alternatives to shitty religions
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written a new book out called Nomad, which picks up where Infidel left off and covers Hirshi Ali’s move to the United States from Europe. She’s been on a book tour for the past few weeks, and I recently caught her on Real Time with Bill Maher and the Colbert Report. She didn’t get to say much on Real Time but she did mention something on Colbert about offering up more moderate religions as a cure for Islamic fundamentalism.
Obviously when you’re dealing with Stephen Colbert you don’t get many opportunities to explain ideas past their surface, but the above video goes into her argument again that many people are going to believe in a higher power regardless of what the evidence says, and it’s important to have options for these people that don’t skew heavily towards the psychopathic. She says Christianity is a good alternative because basically most Christians are pretty lax about their religion’s specifics and just believe in a nebulous lovey-dovey God / Jesus entity who just wants us to be good. I don’t know if I agree with that, but I figure after spending half your life getting subjugated and the other half terrorized by Islam, Christianity would indeed seem lightyears more moderate and less problematic.
Bed & breakfast uses God to discriminate against gays
Another day, another case where people are trying to use their religious beliefs as a legal shield for their bigotry:
The owners of a B.C. bed and breakfast will argue at a B.C. Human Rights Tribunal hearing in Kelowna on Wednesday that their right to freedom of religion permitted them to turn away a homosexual couple.
According to the complaint filed with the tribunal, the gay couple, Shaun Eadie and Brian Thomas, booked a room in June 2009 at the Riverbend Bed and Breakfast in Grand Forks. Owner Susan Molnar received the call and immediately told her husband and co-owner, Les Molnar, that the man making the booking had asked for just one bed, the complaint said. Moments later, Les Molnar called Eadie back and asked if he and Thomas were a gay couple. Eadie said they were. The complaint said that Molnar then cancelled the booking.
Eadie and Thomas later filed their complaint with the tribunal.
In an application to have the complaint dismissed, Les Molnar said “to allow a gay couple to share a bed in my Christian home would violate my Christian beliefs and would cause me and my wife great distress.” He said that to have allowed the booking would be “encouraging something which I believe to be wrong according to my religious beliefs and my understanding of scripture.”
The Molnars also argued in their response that their charter rights to freedom of religion and association protected their decision not to do business with the gay couple.
Just to prove America and the Middle East don’t corner the market on anti-gay sentiment, this story is from my country of Canada. And while we’re lucky enough to have a Human Rights commission that will deal with this issue properly, it doesn’t mean our citizenry is very enlightened … if you want to lose faith in humanity, the comments sections of articles like this are always great for that.
Hitchens on Pascal’s Wager
Fans of the site will know that I absolutely abhor the pathetic and anemic argument that is “Pascal’s Wager”. Here Hitchens compares it to a pathetic used car salesman trying to get you to buy his junker. Who wants a God who can so easily be fooled by the gambler?
Blood is for atonement of sin, not surgery!
Every so often, you read a story about someone in desperate need of a blood transfusion refusing the life giving procedure because of their religious beliefs. The latest story comes from Smethwick, England where a 15 year old boy died after succumbing to his injuries following a tragic car crash in a store (yeah, you heard right). Joshua McAuley is dead now because his beliefs (or more accurately, the beliefs his parents indoctrinated him with).
It seems hospital officials are on the defensive, tripping over themselves claiming the issue of overriding the wishes of parents and minors in similar cases has to be handled delicately on an individual basis (as in, there’s no official policy). No one seems to quite know what to do about situations like this; the Friendly Atheist seems a little confused about what the right move is, and Unreasonable Faith just asks his sizable audience to discuss the matter.
I have a solution I think would work out quite nicely: if a minor wants to forgo receiving a blood transfusion due to his religious convictions, he should be able to explain exactly WHY he believes such a thing is wrong (try to avoid pointing out the flaws with the idea of a person with severe blood loss trying to explain anything at all and just humor me, alright?). You see, the real problem is kids like Joshua may think they have acquired their beliefs through their own personal research and introspection, but like every other religious convert, he was conditioned into believing things that were quite obviously untrue. The reason Witnesses refuse blood is because their interpretation of the Bible specifies blood is only to be used in the atonement of sin, and that’s it. The fact it actually does something much more useful in your body (oh, like carrying oxygen to your cells for instance) is just an inconvenient detail they can’t be bothered to learn. Because Joshua was too ignorant of reality to see the benefit in actually bothering to learn real facts about the natural world, he thought his eternal soul would be in jeopardy if he tried to save his own life with the blood of others. Now he’s just another sad statistic about the dangers of faith.
No one in Arizona is racist, I swear!
It still surprises me how some people still think that Arizona’s draconian Anti-Immigration laws aren’t racist. I hear the same cavalcade of pathetic explanation trying to justify the blatantly immoral actions of the state to essentially criminalize being a darker skin color. If you still don’t believe me, then allow me to show you exhibit A, a school in Prescott, Arizona at the center of another race related controversy. The principle at Miller Valley Elementary School wants a mural depicting children taking environmentally friendly transportation to be “lightened”, since the most prominent children in the picture are not in fact white.
[Principle] Lane said that he received only three complaints about the mural and that his request for a touch-up had nothing to do with political pressure. “We asked them to fix the shading on the children’s faces,” he said. “We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race.”
City Councilman Steve Blair spearheaded a public campaign on his talk show at Prescott radio station KYCA-AM (1490) to remove the mural.
In a broadcast last month, according to the Daily Courier in Prescott, Blair mistakenly complained that the most prominent child in the painting is African-American, saying: “To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?”
The children in the mural were actually selected from real students who go to the school, and the parents and children all loved it. Unfortunately for them, racism and bigotry are alive and well in Arizona. The artists who made the mural reported during its creation, they were subject to hecklers who screamed racial slurs at them. It looks like most people aren’t even bothering to cover up their obvious hatred of anyone who doesn’t have white skin. Congratulations Arizona state on once again making me want to vomit with rage!
UNCG Atheists fight to remove prayer in city council
The UNCG Atheists/Agnostics/Skeptics are still fighting the good fight and trying to get the city council of Greensboro to remove their official prayer during meetings.
FRC lobbied US congress against gay death penalty denouncement
We know the Family Research Council are a bunch of lying bigots who hate homosexuals, but they’ve really been taking it up a notch lately. Just last week they released a bogus ‘study’ claiming if Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed, straight soldiers would be at a heightened risk of being raped by gay soldiers. Now comes word the FRC didn’t only lobby Congress against DADT legislature and same sex marriage, but against a bill voicing America’s disgust at Uganda’s death penalty for homosexuals.
It’s time for the Southern Poverty Law Center to reclassify the Family Research Council as an official hate group, not merely anti-gay as they are now listed. According to the FRC’s official lobbying report for the first quarter of 2010, they paid two of their henchmen $25,000 to lobby Congress against approving a resolution denouncing Uganda’s plan to execute homosexuals. The resolution passed in the Senate on April 13th, but remains languishing in the House almost four months after being referred to the Foreign Affairs Committee. Did the FRC’s lobbying kill it? As we learned last week with Malawi, international pressure CAN sway even the most virulently anti-gay government.
Below are three screencaps of the 20-page Family Research Council lobbying report supplied to me by Duncan Osbourne at Gay City News. Among the other items they lobbied against are the overturn of DADT and DOMA, which is to be expected. But it’s almost astounding, almost, that they would lobby the members of Congress against denouncing the death penalty for LGBT people.
Maybe if Christians would just leave everyone the fuck alone, I wouldn’t piss on them so much. But stuff like this just highlights how involved fundamentalists are in the political process and how they’ll do whatever it takes to force their exclusionary and divisive beliefs on everyone. Honestly, I just don’t understand why religious people are so obsessed about who’s sticking what in which hole. There’s a great documentary out there I recommend everyone watch called Outrage which basically makes the argument many of the most vicious opponents of homosexuality are closeted men. Considering how many people fighting this stuff have been caught with their members in the chocolate cookie jar, it doesn’t surprise me.
Christians want the freedom to shut Comedy Central up too
In possibly one of the most ironic cases of life imitating art ever, Christians are now saying because Mohammad can’t be made fun of on Comedy Central, Jesus should be off limits too.
A coalition of religious and conservative leaders is trying to stop a proposed Comedy Central cartoon that puts Jesus Christ in a modern-day context – before it even gets started.
The newly formed Citizens Against Religious Bigotry said Thursday that it believes the “JC” series would be offensive. They accuse Comedy Central of a double standard in mocking Christian figures and beliefs while recently refusing to let “South Park” depict the Prophet Muhammad for fear of offending Muslims.
“You don’t have to be a Christian to be offended by this,” said Brent Bozell, head of the watchdog Media Research Center.
Yeah, you really do. Newsflash, retards: every day, people are doing stuff you may not approve of or personally agree with. But they’re still allowed to do it because we live in a free society. Here’s a novel concept for you douchebags: if you don’t like a TV show, then don’t fucking watch it.
Saudi Arabia’s morality police still fighting sin
There are some signs the morality police in Saudi Arabia (officially known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice) are starting to get some pushback from the people they’re charged with keeping holy. Last week a woman reportedly beat on one of their agents after he tried to punish her for hanging out with a male friend, unmarried. And there are current reforms underway which may lead to the founding of a co-ed school, where men and women will be allowed to learn and mingle sans stuffy Islamic asshole cops. Not that crazy of an idea to us, but over in Saudi Arabia it’s causing a huge fuss amongst the conservative fundamentalists.
But even with progress, it’s important to note things are still pretty fucked up over there. The woman who attacked the religious vice cop is liable to end up getting lashed and put in jail and Flying Spaghetti Monster knows what else. And a recent show on MTV has the morality police investigating several youths to see if they were guilty of ‘openly declaring sin.’ Their crimes?
In the program – called Resist the Power! Saudi Arabia – a girl named only as Fatimah told how she disguised herself as a boy to ride a bicycle in the streets of Jeddah.
The 20-year-old also railed against the traditional women’s dress – a black robe known as an abaya.
She said she made her own abayas in bright colours, which she sold to friends.
A young man, Aziz, talked about his attempts to break the strict segregation of the sexes in Saudi life – to meet his girlfriend for a date.
“We are not free to live as we like,” said the 24-year-old.
The four part documentary, which was screened in the US, also followed a Saudi heavy metal band who struggled to find venues that would allow them to play.
Riding a bike, going on a date, playing music … all sins in Saudi Arabia that can lead to serious jailtime. Ain’t religion the best?
Should science programs be ‘impartial’ to religion?
Morgan Freeman is doing a series of TV shows for the Science Channel called ‘Through the Wormhole’, which discusses advances in discovery that astrobiology, string theory, quantum mechanics, and astrophysics have been making in our understanding of the universe. And while there are some signs Freeman himself isn’t exactly the most religious person in the world, he still had to pander to the religious crowd while promoting the show on NPR. Here’s what the first caller in to the radio program asked Freeman:
VINCE: My question, Mr. Freeman, is how impartial is the series overall to different views of science and religion?
Mr. FREEMAN: Well, you – I don’t think you can make a series like this and have it partial, because we have to entertain all thoughts, all of the theories around a certain subject. The whole idea is to bring in all of the different theories and thoughts. Particularly if you’re talking about something like creation, you know, you can’t just go in and say this is such and this is such and this is such. Actually, nobody knows. So we get – try to get a rounded perspective on it.
CONAN: The – having seen that episode, even if in a beta form, and I think the only parts I didn’t see were some, obviously the full narration, but there were some illustration system, some graphics that weren’t inserted as yet. But nevertheless, there were – those who take a literal reading of the Bible will not find that view even mentioned.
Mr. FREEMAN: Or very encouraging. No, no, no, they will not, but still, we have to accept that if you take the Bible literally, then the world is only about 6,000 years old. So we have to do that with care, of course, but ask the questions. So mostly what the series does is ask the questions. I don’t think it produces any answers.
CONAN: It does not come to a firm conclusion on the point, Vince, I can assure of that, without giving away the ending.
Mr. FREEMAN: Okay.
Wrap your head around the question again: how ‘impartial’ is this science series when dealing with science and religion. What? I would hope the show is partial to SCIENCE since science is real and religion is kooky garbage. It’s nice to hear Freeman say literalists are not going to be happy about the ideas discussed, but holy crap. If religious people are still stuck on garbage like the age of the earth, how are you supposed to remain ‘impartial’ as far as they’re concerned while voicing advanced theories on the nature of the universe as a whole?