Author Archives: Jacob Fortin

Jimmy Carter makes the right move

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I’ve always liked Jimmy Carter. Maybe it’s his ‘Habitat for Humanity’ project which I find refreshing and practical. Maybe it’s his commitment to his own code of ethics. It could also be the fact he was one of the few presidents who actually thought weed should not be illegal. We may not agree on the subject of religion, but one thing is for sure: Jimmy is nobody’s bitch.

Recently, he’s left the Southern Baptist Church, an organization he’d been a part of for over 60 years. The reason? Well, old Jimmy here felt the rampant sexism and misogyny of the church was simply too much:

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

I hope this will encourage others to leave institutions which they find morally reprehensible. I don’t care how nice the individuals within the organization are; if they believe in things which run contrary to your own ethical code of conduct, it’s time to leave. Case closed.

Now, if we can all convince Jimmy this sexism is itself an integral part of Christianity (after all, the Baptists have plenty of Biblical passages to support their conclusions), maybe Jimmy and I can finally see eye to eye on the topic of God…

Abstinence teaching is insanity

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According to a report by the Center for Disease Control, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases rose during the Bush years, a direct consequence of their policy of ‘abstinence teaching’. Anyone who has seriously studied the issue of teen sex knows abstinence is about as effective as cold showers. And yet, I’m sure that as we speak, the religious right thinks the increase is actually proof MORE abstinence teaching is needed. This is the definition of insanity; doing the same thing and expecting different results.

What is sad about all this are the adults who were in charge of protecting American teens have utterly failed to do so. They were so busy trying to push their religious agenda that they perpetually refused to accept the reality of the situation: if you want to lower pregnancy and STI rates, you need to teach kids about sex. This is the same group of people who want to make abortions illegal. The irony here is if they simply gave young people better information on protection rather than rely on Biblical literalism, there would be fewer teen pregnancies, and therefore fewer abortions. It really is that simple.

More evil in the name of religion

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Remember the old saying that for people to do evil things, you need religion [note: ok, the quote is actually from Steven Weinberg and is “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”, but I wanted to save the space! Sue me!]? Well, here’s another great example of why this is true. You’ll find our usual moral compass can often be hijacked when following the code of ethics of now extinct civilizations.

Case in point: It is against Iranian law to execute a girl if she is a virgin. That’s why any young woman facing execution in Iran are typically ‘married’ to the prison guards who are then instructed to rape them. This is how the Ayatollahs want things to be run, and because they have religious infallibility on their side, they get their way.

I won’t even get into the details of why these women are killed in the first place; it could be from accidentally killing her male attacker (this is a fairly popular one, as it seems these are not the types of women you want to be messing with), or being a political dissident. The disturbing thing here is the guard being interviewed in this article doesn’t even sound like he wanted to do this at all. In fact, if anything, he seems most disturbed by his actions. How could he not be?

I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their ‘wedding’ night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.

“I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over,” he said. “I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her.”

Instinctually, there are bound to be certain religious doctrines we find morally repulsive, but the unfortunate thing here is our cultural and religious traditions discourage us from abandoning these terrible and dehumanizing practices.

It’s not my law; it’s God’s!

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I think what upsets me the most about many Christians is their incessant need to remind non-believers we are going to burn in eternal fire for not subscribing to their religion. Personally, I find it a most repulsive idea, and the tragedy is most of these individuals are convinced that by reminding us our ‘souls’ are facing eternal torture, they are actually doing us a big favor.

The problem here is not their proselytizing; I actually don’t mind when people try to change my opinion about a subject. It allows me to ‘preach’ my atheism back to them, so at least there’s an implicit understanding there. My problem is how easily these people seem to gloss over the fact fundamentally, they have no moral objection to seeing me eternally tortured. They believe since the rulebook wasn’t written by them, it isn’t their responsibility as to what happens when non-believers die; that’s all God’s doing.

There are plenty of terrible examples of the kind of horror humans inflict on one another when they are simply ‘following orders’. The Millgram experiments in the 60s showed so long as human beings are told by a person of authority what to do, over half of the test subjects were willing to kill someone if ultimately the responsibility wasn’t theirs. It was a chilling reminder that even the nicest people can do evil things given the right circumstances.

My message to Christians is fairly straightforward; you shouldn’t accept the poisonous idea non-believers are condemned to hell. If your God really is all loving, there’s no reason to punish those who simply fail to accept his existence. Besides, there are so many religions out there the odds are stacked AGAINST anyone actually getting the right one, so it’s likely that we’d all end up in Hell anyways. What a terrible thing to think, is it not?

So, please stop trying to pass the buck and claim it isn’t your choice that I go to Hell. If you are a good person, how could you accept that your Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist, or Jewish friend will be burning in brimstone and ash while you enjoy the comforts of paradise? Could you eat a great meal if you had to consume it in front of a bunch of starving African children? If you could, then shame on you.

Spiritual mathematics

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You have to love guys like Jerry Falwell and the twisted way they persuade people to give them money. Here he is giving people what is perhaps the worst financial advice I’ve ever heard: if you don’t have a lot of money, it’s because you aren’t giving enough of it to your church. I guess God is for sale, and in Jerry’s case, business was always booming. It’s no secret this guy was rich. How can you not be when people are giving you 10% of their salary?

I miss George Carlin

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He hasn’t even been dead for a year and already I miss his antics. We need a new comedian to fill the role of hilarious curmudgeon to otherwise shame and ridicule people who believe in stupid things. Here he is pointing out that UFO believers are actually less crazy than Christians.

You die because you sin!

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Alright, it’s time for Ray Comfort to explain the mysteries of life to you. Here he is explaining to people why you cannot go to heaven based on your own goodness, since all human beings are inherently evil. Like the rest of his evangelical ilk, he believes the only way to ‘secure’ your place in magic land is by believing in Jesus, who had to be tortured and killed as blood atonement for the curse God (who is also supposed to be Jesus) placed upon all of us from birth.

He also claims it isn’t aging that kills us; it’s sin. So, the reason we get old and die is because our bodies decay like the Emperor in Star Wars. As you can guess, this is not the reason we die, and it certainly sends a pretty bleak message about how terrible we are as people, since salvation is impossible for anyone who isn’t into blood sacrifice. Pretty sick ideology if you ask me.

Helen Ukpabio is a monster

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I’ve written many times on the issue of child witches in Africa. Every year, thousands of kids are abandoned, beaten or killed because their parents or family members suspect them of being witches. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that in Nigeria alone, over 930,000 children are orphaned by HIV/AIDS, and often their remaining family members believe these children were responsible for their parents’ death.

One name keeps popping up I can no longer ignore: Helen Ukpabio. Helen has been producing movies capitalizing on the fear of witchcraft for some time. The Nigerian film board has repeatedly tried to censor her dangerous and violent rhetoric, but because of their corruption and general ineptitude, these videos are allowed to circulate to the surrounding populace, creating fear, violence and hatred as a result.

Helen has done quite well for herself fanning the flames of fear. She boasts over 50,000 members in her church, and the future seems bright for her. The proliferation of her movies and her massive church attendance has made Helen a rich and powerful woman in Nigeria. With her obsession with child witches growing, it’s difficult to imagine how this practice can be stopped.

If you want to know what the face of evil is, then look no further than this woman, who profits from the death and torture of little children. Nigeria is the most dangerous place to be a child, and it’s because of people like Ukpabio and her ilk. This is the true danger of superstition: it makes otherwise peaceful humans into fearful monsters who would murder their own children. Women like Helen Ukpabio are shielded from responsibility for their crime by a bubble of religious delusion. No doubt she must think WE are the ones who are monsters for allowing witches to run free. What a sad and ignorant world we live in.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews keep protesting

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Seems like every other day Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel are protesting something. This week it’s the arrest of an Orthodox woman who was slowly starving her child to death. It’s believed she has a form of Munchausen syndrome, keeping her child sick in order to gain sympathy from others. Ultra-Orthodox Jews are extreme isolationists, and consider any governmental interference in their affairs worthy of protest. In this case, they’ve taken the side of the mother, despite the fact the mother had even tried to disconnect her child’s feeding tubes at the hospital.

The hilarious thing about this situation is it embodies the major problem of religious belief; that it’s often impossible to differentiate between serious mental illness and strong religiosity. The two carry the same symptoms: intense paranoia, irrational behavior, and feelings of prosecution. Rather than be horrified by the neglect of a child, the protesters are outraged because the government became involved in ‘their affairs’. These are the same assholes who threw dirty dippers and stones at police for opening a parking structure on a Saturday. Clearly, they are a reasonable bunch.

I’m sick and tired of trying to pretend I respect the idiotic beliefs of deeply delusional humans. It’s one thing to hold your beliefs privately, but quite another to enforce your beliefs on others. I would ask them kindly to fuck off, but these morons are too far up their own asses to notice the rest of the world does not give a shit about their backwards ideology.

Creation museum claims “undeniable proof” of creationism

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I’ve written extensively about the Creation Museum because it represents the ‘peak’ of creation ‘science’. Here is a museum that takes a serious stance as to the value of scientific understanding; which is to say they see little to no value in the principle. It’s ironic, of course, that the museum uses the latest in robotics and animatronics technology (itself a product of our scientific endeavors) to support their literal interpretation of the Bible.

Modern creationists don’t even realize the debt they owe to science. During the time when the Bible was written, simple infections that are routinely treated today would have been deadly. The child mortality rate was about 300 deaths for every 1,000 births, meaning that the odds were good that if you had three kids, one of them would not live past the age of 5. Modern germ theory has given us the tools to bring the number of child death down to a tiny 6 every thousand, making child mortality a rare (though still tragic) occurrence.

You cannot fully grasp modern germ theory without first understanding the process of evolution. Deadly pathogens, bacteria and other small invaders evolve far more rapidly than any other organism due to their speed of reproduction. Luckily, as we learn more, we create potent vaccines that prepare our bodies for the onslaught of these tiny intruders. In developing countries, measles, a disease which can be eradicated with a successful vaccination campaign, still kills an estimated 500,000 people a year, many of them children.

The very fact modern Christians have the luxury to teach nonsense to their own children is due entirely to the tireless efforts of scientists to improve our understanding of the natural world, which in turn allows us to develop new and better ways to protect ourselves from its onslaught. Nature may be cruel, but as our scientific understanding grows, we have increasingly softened it.

Atheist PZ Myers is planning a visit to the museum with his posse, and in response, director Ken Ham says he has a surprise for them; a supposedly irrefutable argument that supports their literal interpretation of the Bible. It’s a chestnut we’ve heard often from Ken, and it’s always met with dismal failure. Why would this time be any different? Ken and his ilk don’t understand the first thing about science; they don’t realize that the cars they drive to work, the tap water they drink, and the tools they used to build their temple to ignorance are only possible because of our growing scientific sophistication and understanding. They prefer to live in the bliss of their own ignorance, and their aim is to drag us all down to their level. I like the view from up here just fine, Ken.

Ireland is messed up

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With the country still feeling the impact of the Ryan report, which chronicled decades of mental and sexual abuse by the Catholic Church, the government has acted swiftly in light of these events and passed a new “blasphemy law”, which would make disparaging religion a criminal offence. The law seeks to punish offenders with a fine of up to €25,000.

The law is surely going to blow up in their faces. By trying to defend the church with this poorly conceived blasphemy law, the government now has to enforce an edict that will turn out to be a political quagmire. To be fair, a blasphemy law was already in effect, but the changes were made to avoid a costly referendum to remove this unpleasant piece of legislature. Still, it only enforces the perception that the Catholic Church has far too much power in Ireland, and this law at the very least gives the growing secular movement in the country more fodder in calling for the separation of Church and State. How can any country consider themselves modern and ‘free’ when they seek to punish their own citizens for simply refusing to respect ancient superstitions? It’s downright pathetic.

The government claims the law is meant also to protect other faiths. Does Reiki, astral projection and other moronic belief systems qualify as well? Why don’t we also make it illegal to make fun of people who think Friday the 13th is unlucky? If the whole purpose of this law is to demonstrate how weak the church has become by involving the government in their petty disputes, then they’ve succeeded brilliantly.

Human beings embarrass me

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I will never get over the fact human beings worship inanimate objects. Here is a bunch of sad idiots who think a tree stump is an apparition of the Virgin Mary. You can see from this video how impressed everyone is by what is obviously just a fucking tree stump.

How sad that we live in a world where we know why people have a tendency to see shapes and patterns in things (it’s called pareidolia), and yet we can’t seem to convince the deluded masses that a barely recognizable face-like pattern in a tree is anything other than a ‘divine miracle’.

I can only weep for humanity as we continue to look so goddamn foolish. Has no one there pointed out the fact this is just a stupid tree stump that they are worshiping? Even their own church has the good sense to be skeptical about it.

Reports of clerical abuse keep pouring in

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One of my favorite movie moments from childhood is the scene from Rocky 4 where Rocky Balboa keeps getting repeatedly punched in the face by Ivan Drago (perhaps Doulph Lundgren’s greatest role), until finally, exhausted from punching, Drago is defeated. Rocky 4 was a true 80s cheese movie, complete with endless montages, pointless moralizing about steroid use, and of course, America winning the day. Despite its obvious flaws, the movie tries to covey the idea that no matter how many blows you take, you can still come back as long as you have enough sheer determination.

The Catholic Church must feel like Rocky right now. Every other day, some new allegation of clerical abuse is made, and you have to wonder how many more blows they can take to the face before they finally fall. The latest punch in the mouth comes from this article in the Independent, which deals with an abuse scandal of The Legion of Christ, an ultra-conservative, ultra-secretive sect of the church run by Father Marcial Maciel Degollado. A well connected and charismatic figure, Maciel was close to Pope Jean Paul II, and many considered him a saintly man beyond all reproach. As usual, this smokescreen belied his seemingly insatiable thirst for young boys:

A year after Nuestro Padre’s death in 2008, the Vatican announced an investigation into the Legion. An unnamed official told America’s National Catholic Reporter newspaper that the total number of Maciel’s abuse victims was “more than 20 and less than 100″. As a team of cardinals opens the locked cupboards of an organization that prided itself on secrecy – all new recruits had to take a unique private vow (abolished by Benedict in 2007) never to speak ill of the founder and to report to superiors anyone who did – the Catholic Church is once more mired in a scandal about the sexual abuse of minors, and the abuse of power.

When reports of abuse started coming in, the church did what they do best. They ignored it completely:

Then, in 1976, Father Juan Vaca…formally reported Maciel to his bishop for sexually abusing him from the age of 12. This was a time before the sexual abuse of minors by priests had been exposed. In 1978, fearing that his accusations had been swept under the carpet, Vaca sent a long statement about what had happened to him direct to the Vatican, and even received an acknowledgement. And then, nothing.

They story goes on to detail the restrictive and suffocating control Maciel has had on his followers. The Legion of Christ was no small institution; it had an annual budget of more than 435 million pounds, and ‘Our Father, or Nuestro Padre’ (as he was called by his followers) enjoyed a multitude of personal luxuries, including private suites, cars, and anything he desired to eat. Truly, here was a child molester living in paradise, able to control and manipulate his victims using the power of their faith to bend them to his will.

I’m not surprised this kind of stuff happens so often; the Church’s long policy of silence and secrecy makes it the perfect place for child molesters to hide. I’m not suggesting that all priests abuse children; but their beloved institution is corrupt to the core, with abusers at the highest levels of power. What I find surprising is how dismissive Catholics seem about this. No matter how many scandals come out, people still bring their children into the fold. Scary.

Iranian singer gets 5 years in jail for blasphemy

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You can always tell how confident a religion is by the amount of laws they throw around to ‘protect’ their faith. Blasphemy laws represent perhaps the most obvious example of the cowardly nature of organized religion: they are created specifically to punish anyone who questions the power of these organizations and their masters. The latest casualty in the fight against religious tyranny is Iranian singer Mohsen Namjoo, who recorded (privately, according to him) a song disparaging the Koran. It was leaked on the Internet, and so a judge has sentenced him in absentia to 5 years in jail.

Mohsen lent his voice in condemning the June 12th Iranian election results, so I’m suspicious the main reason for such a harsh sentence is political. So long as religions and governments are intertwined, unjust blasphemy laws will continue to jail people for the ‘crime’ of being skeptical. How can any human being truly be free when they cannot even express their opinions on religion? If the truth of Islam is so overwhelming, why are they so afraid of dissent?