Author Archives: Jacob Fortin

Get your shit together, America!

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You keep hearing America is a divided nation. What that means is a certain portion of the population still believes homosexuals should be beaten or killed, the Government should be ruled as a theocracy, and only free market principles can help take care of people’s health issues (it’s been working great so far, right?).

Legislators in America have been attempting to get hate laws amended to include homosexuals, but so far, they’ve met with fierce opposition. House Minority Leader John Boehner says only “immutable characteristics” should be included in hate laws. This means he believes religion is something you are born with, but not homosexuality. That, according to him, is entirely a choice.

Yeah, it’s quite clearly a choice, John. I’m sure this guy, who was savagely beaten by two men (one of which has a tattoo of Leviticus 18:22), chose to be gay. The attackers are also claiming it was completely justified, saying that Jack Price (the victim) had “come on to them”.

What is frustrating here is that no one is calling out these people for the bigoted pieces of shit they really are. Boner Boehner gets away with his homophobic ranting because the majority of his constituents feel the same way he does. It’s time we put these kinds of people to shame; there’s no other way to go about it, America. Either you do something about the fact a significant portion of your population is dangerously stupid, or these same assholes will drag you down to the Dark Ages. Is that what you really want?

Yeehaa, it’s a good old fashion book burnin’!

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Remember how Jimmy Carter quit his Baptist faith because he said they were getting way too hardcore for him? Continuing their fine tradition of being crazy fuckers, a small Baptist Church near Asheville, NC is having a Halloween book burning BBQ, complete with food, music, and reading materials; all of it scheduled to be grilled to perfection.

Pastor Marc Grizzard seems like a totally reasonable guy, believing the King James Bible is the only true interpretation of the Bible, despite being written in 1611 by the Church of England (before then, everyone had a wrong copy I have to assume). I guess to a crazy, uneducated white guy, the Bible HAS to be in English, or it’s a bust.

They also seem to think that any other version is actually the work of the devil, so their little bonfire is their way of showing everyone just how reasonable and level headed they all are. That, or they are just a bunch of white trash morons who think everything that expands your mind is connected to Satan. Why don’t you guys progress out of the 18th century and come join us at the grown up table, ok?

Sex it up with Jesus!

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How many of you believers out there are tired of not being able to have anal sex or a hot threesome with your wife because she’s a Christian? Well, have no fear you poor sexually frustrated bastard, a theological solution is here. Just go to SexinChrist.com to know everything you need to know about how God permits that kind of wonderful sodomy.

Now I know what you’re going to say: “Jake, surely it’s too good to be true. Are you sure I can have my chastity and my orgiastic parties at the same time?” Who fucking cares? This is probably the only way you can finally convince your spouse that God commands his followers to shave their bikini zones.

Honestly, my favorite chapter was the one on how strong erections are a gift from God, which therefore makes Viagra a gift from God. You hear that, ladies? When I take this pill invented by a bunch of scientists, my penis gets harder than granite because God wills it. Hallelujah!

What’s the CARM?

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You have to love Christian apologetics. These are the guys who dedicate their lives trying to explain away all the stupid, awful, or just plain terrible stuff from the Bible. The Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry is the saddest example of the need many Christians have of a supposedly rational world view. The site dedicates itself to trying to prove the Bible is consistent and truthful, which is about as fruitful as trying to prove  rainbows really DO have a pot of gold on the other side.

Here is CARM’s mandate directly from their website:

Why this site? – To equip Christians with the truth, to expose the error of false religious systems, evolution, to teach apologetics, help Christians defend the faith, and to glorify the Lord Jesus.

They have a section on atheists (which is relatively harmless and amusing), but the crown jewel of the site has to be the gargantuan effort of trying to prove that the story of Noah’s Ark in Genesis was a literal event. The author decides to try and “scientifically” break down the distribution of all the various species to prove it would be possible to hold all these animals on just one boat. It’s like trying to fit an entire bag of marshmallows in your mouth; even if you can do it, who the fuck cares?

I’ll start by telling you that the article, though attempting to be fair, bungles up the numbers right away. The author places the amount of different insects species at about 850,000, which is only off the mark by roughly 6-10 million. He grossly underestimates the amount of mammalian and avian species currently known (ignoring all the ones we actually haven’t discovered yet), and fails to explain something as simple as their “redistribution” after the flood (**note** I wrote that marsupials were found only in Australia, but I was mistaken. They may have originated in Southeast Asia, but the point is still the same).

Of course the most obvious question (other than “are you an idiot, sir?”), is “how did all these wild animals not eat each other? It’s kind of what they do. OK, Mr. Science man, tell us how they did it:

It should also be considered that many animals can hibernate. Additionally, predators and prey have been known to live peacefully together during situations of stress like fire, flood, or earthquake. In the Ark, animal behavior probably would have been different from normal daily life. Specialists in animal behavior have noted that animals can sense danger and have often migrated to escape it. Perhaps God used their migratory instincts to get them to the Ark.

Though this is only a brief analysis, it should present enough evidence that the Ark account is certainly within the realm of possibility.

Replace brief with ridiculous, and we’re in complete agreement, buddy.

More proof Pro-Lifers live in a fantasy land

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Are you not tired of people refusing to believe in reason? I know I am. Scientists keeps finding shit out, and morons keep ignoring what they say. The latest in a series of major studies no one will listen to is on whether or not restricting legal abortion reduces the number of women trying to end their pregnancies. The result, unsurprisingly, is that it doesn’t do jack-shit.

I want to speak directly to any pro-lifer who may have stumbled upon this site right now. While you might be naïve enough to think that by making a stupid law, you’d somehow “make the world safe for babies”, the only thing you would do is create more problems. Laws invariably creates scofflaws (are you seriously going to jail women for getting abortions?), and since women seek abortions even when they aren’t legal, they would be taking huge health risks terminating their pregnancies. Same amount of abortions, just a lot more deaths and jail sentences. Great job.

So here’s the thing, boys and girls. Abortions aren’t pleasant, but they happen. You have to deal with the fact life isn’t some Disney bullshit, and by trying so hard to ignore reality, you’re just making everything worse. It might be hard for you to accept, but the rest of the world grew up and realized the best way to avoid human suffering and misery was by being smart, not indignant.

Study finds women are more religious than men

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A couple months ago, I recorded a podcast explaining that women were far more superstitious than men. I cited Michael Shermer, author of the book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule, and his study that found while men try to rationalize their beliefs, women use emotions to justify theirs. This, in turn, makes women far more susceptible to the lure of religion.

I got a few emails from fans criticizing these statements, accusing me of generalizing. Well, for those of you who doubted me the first time, check out this latest study that supports everything I had previously said.

If you’ll recall the show, I also admitted women were less likely to attack, kill, or steal from you, but no one accused me then of “generalizing”. Here’s the thing I want everyone to understand; when you’re talking about people in a broad sense (like whether or not men are more violent than women), you HAVE to generalize. If you tried to incorporate every single exception in your model, you’ve learned absolutely nothing about the subject matter you are studying. It’s also stupid to assume such studies are sexist; women are more religious than men on average. Get over it.

Obviously it doesn’t mean that if you’re a woman, you automatically believe in God. This is why I find atheist women so damn attractive; statistically they should be more likely to believe, but their own critical faculties, intelligence and independent mindedness has allowed them to break free of the bubble of religious delusion. How wonderful that these women have chosen to cast off the often repressive and submissive role religion had in store for them. It’s hot I tells you!

In your face

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This is why you have to LOVE Hitchens. Putting to rest the tired old argument that Nazism was a “secular” movement. What a load of bullshit. Everything Hitler and Mussolini did was with the fucking blessing of the Church. The Religious Right wants all of us to forget that messy affair, but luckily guys like Christopher Hitchens are around to kindly repudiate their lies.

Cthulhu and the Constitution

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After seeing the travesty that was the original, it’s nice to know people with Photoshop skills can still make fun of wacky Christians. I personally find it puts everything in perspective; why isn’t it as likely that the constitution was “inspired” by Cthulhu rather than Jesus? If you think it’s because the Founding Fathers were Christians, you need to read a fucking history book that wasn’t written by a Baptist Minister, son!

Tony Blair is a scumbag

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There are lots of reasons to dislike Tony Blair. The fact he supported and participated in the War in Iraq already qualifies him as downright dastardly, and his growing religiosity is becoming a matter of serious concern. He’s made no bones about trying to be President of the European Council, and considering Europe is largely secular, his recent statements should alarm any atheist or agnostic living there:

We face the challenge of relevance – showing how faith can be a force for the future, for progress, that it will not fade as science, technology and material prosperity alters the way we live. We face an aggressive secular attack from without. We face the threat of extremism from within.

Those who scorn God and those who do violence in God’s name, both represent views of religion. But both offer no hope for faith in the twenty first century.

What the fuck is this asshole talking about? Is he equating sectarian violence with peaceful secular protest? Does he really believe atheism is the root of evil? This is the same man who followed religious nutbag George W. Bush into Babylon, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis; and for what? Oil? Yeah, the secular left who opposed this tragedy of a war must be the bad guys. Can’t you just see us strapping ourselves to explosives and murdering innocent civilians all in the name of no God? I wonder what that would look like…

Jesus and the Constitution

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I feel like this painting is like one of those hilarious “spot the fallacy” kind of games, so I thought it might be fun to try and point out as many hilarious flaws present in this shitty painting. Feel free to add to the list in the comments:

#1. Jesus did not invent the Constitution. It’s no small irony that most of the Founding Fathers were deists.
#2. Supreme Court Judges are apparently crybabies.
#3. The painter has a huge boner for soldiers. There are over 8 different types of military personnel.
#4. Ronald Regan gets more face time than the majority of the founding fathers.
#5. They included Thomas Paine in there, despite the fact that he wrote a book destroying Christianity.
#6. No visible signs of slavery or racism here. All the black people look pretty happy about the fact that these same dutiful Christians enslaved them for a few hundred years, all inspired by the Bible!
#7. Satan is hanging out with the University Professor, “Mr. Hollywood”, the Liberal Media, and Lawyers (ok, that one is more fair). Also, Alexander Hamilton appears to be the only founding father to spot Satan, and he looks pretty calm about the whole thing.
#8. The only visible immigrant (Chinese perhaps) is cowering before the shiny head of Jesus
#9. Even a little kid can see that Jesus’ name does not appear in the Constitution, nor is his signature there.

A culture of child brides

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Child brides are a reality in the Middle East. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when this tradition started gaining wide acceptance, but one thing is for sure: Most Islamic countries (especially poorer ones) regard this practice as normal, even beneficial. Why wouldn’t they? Their own prophet, Mohammad, consummated his marriage with his favorite bride, Aisha, when she was only 9 years old (there’s considerable whitewashing when it comes to the issue of her age. In fact, even Wikipedia avoids mentioning it, an obvious pandering to Islamic apologetics). The story is either generally not discussed in the Islamic community, or if it is, it’s used as justification for this disgusting tradition.

CNN has the touching and painful story of little Nujood Ali, a 10 year old Yemeni girl who recently had to fight to divorce her much older abusive “husband”. She’s become somewhat of a celebrity, and her parents (the same people who basically sold her away to a pervert) are angry that her fame has not resulted in any money for them.

The most disturbing element in this story is under Sharia law, the husband had to be compensated financially for the divorce. So rather than go to jail for beating and raping this child, the courts have ordered Nujood to pay her husband more than 200 dollars. That’s a massive sum in a country where a significant portion of the population live off less than $1 a day.

Finally, (some) justice for little Kara Neuman

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Remember the tragic story of Kara Neumann? She was the 11 year old girl who died of complications due to diabetes while her Christian Science parents prayed for her. What was a highly treatable condition thanks to today’s modern medicine turned into second degree reckless homicide.

If you were hoping the judge was going to throw the book at them, get ready to be severely disappointed. All they got was 10 years probation, and they have to spend one month in jail every year for 6 years. It’s like going to camp for the summer, except rather than cooking marshmallows by the roaring fire, you’re trying to avoid getting corn-holed in the shower.

I’m glad the case is finally over and the parents are going to be punished, but in the end a little girl still died because of her parents’ ignorant beliefs. It’s frustrating this kind of thing keeps happening all the time, but until we stop believing in primitive superstitions, these types of tragedies will continue to be fairly common.

Bible Redux

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So apparently the Bible is way too liberal for some. The Conservative Bible Project is the inspired project of Conservapedia, that great resource of idiocy, backwardness, and general ignorance. They’ve decided the Bible needed to be expunged of the socialist elements, such as the use of: comrade, labor, and volunteer. They also want it to reflect their free market ideals:

Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.

Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

Obviously no one can stop these psychos from taking an already scary tome and editing all the peaceful and beneficial elements out of it. What we should do, on the other hand, is use this opportunity to show just how often religious manuals are manipulated and changed to fit the particular mores of the times. Conservatives have a gigantic hard-on for two things: Jesus and money, and so their Bible will be an eclectic mix of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be.

Do we need to remind these guys that Jesus did not invent capitalism? I know they want to make greed their religion, but that shit is just getting totally out of control here. Can we all collectively agree these people are insane?

Religious Conservatives are desperate

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It’s a good thing prayer does absolutely nothing (other than waste people’s time I suppose). If it did, can you imagine the kind of world we’d be living in? How many times have people prayed for terrible, deadly, or awful things to happen to other human beings, or for entire civilizations to decline and fall prey to the sword of the Lord? Sure, most of the time people pray for fairly harmless or even unselfish things, but if it did indeed work, the world would be subject to random whims of the faithful. Luckily, the power of prayer is an oxymoron, but that hasn’t stopped Conservative Christians from adopting it in a last ditch effort to get liberals to “change their minds” about things.

The Liberty Council (I love how Conservative institutions have such Orwellian names) is a nonprofit organization lead by a man called Mat Staver. In their desperation, the Liberty Council has decided to launch an intense campaign of prayer they call “Adopt a Liberal”. The idea is simple: people choose a left leaning politician and pray for them to become conservative until your hands are raw. On the list is Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nancy Pelosi, and openly homosexual congressman Barney Frank. They even made special cards for people who don’t actually follow politics closely enough to know the names and details of their own representatives. In other words, it’s like some kind of weird trading card shtick.

For his part, Staver says he won’t hold his breath [about whether or not it will have any effect]. But he does think one thing is on his side: “God is the ultimate trump card, there’s no question about that.”

Maybe you don’t question it Mat, but we sure do.

Ray Comfort vs Evolution

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This comic is dedicated to Ray’s blog “Atheist Central“, where he recently responded to the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus. As usual, Ray is busy accusing scientists of making shit up. He’s so deluded the fool doesn’t even realize the irony of him calling Evolution “faith based” (does he think that’s a good or a bad thing also? I’m confused).

I’m no longer surprised when idiots like Ray Comfort flatly deny the evidence for evolution, but I draw the line when these same jerkoffs say science is somehow “faith based”, while simultaneously claiming their own convoluted belief system is supposedly supported by evidence. What evidence? What the hell is this fucking moron talking about?

You know, for the most part scientists are too busy actually doing science to even bother paying attention to these guys. In the old days, we used to think all we needed to do was ignore these morons and they would somehow magically go away. That didn’t work out so well. Then we tried to debate them, appearing on various news programs trying to defend what is perhaps the most widely tested scientific theory of all time. So far, that hasn’t worked either.

These people aren’t interested in the truth, and they certainly aren’t interested in any real debate. Ray Comfort and his ilk are either deliberately lying (which is what I suspect), or consciously trying to ignore anything that conflicts with their predetermined world view. You can’t win a debate with someone who refuses to accept the rules of logic, so why are we so busy abiding by them when they don’t?

If you want to want to keep wasting your time trying to argue with intellectual midgets, be my guest. Personally I’m done playing Mr. Nice Guy. If it’s war they want, it’s war they’ll get!

(NOTE: Ray has since discontinued the blog and removed the article)