Mark Foley: Serial Counselee

According to the source, the church offered Foley counseling in the matter, which Foley accepted. He plans to begin that counseling after completing treatment for alcoholism.

Busy busy busy. Once his alcoholism's cured surely the church will find his homoness a snap. Or maybe he could be gay, but, you know, just not do anything about it ever.

We shall see. The wisdom of going into the slaughterhouse where you lost your hand for a lesson in surgery is questionable.

If You Act Like a Jew You'll Encourage the Nazis

Hmm.

Second minister enters veils debate

Press Association
Sunday October 8, 2006 2:08 AM

A second Government minister has entered the debate over Muslim women who veil their faces, with a warning that they risked provoking "fear and resentment" which played into the hands of the far right.

Aren't you doing the far right's bidding by stating this? Don't get me wrong: I'm as intolerant of religion, specific ones even, as the next lout. Still, what people choose to wear, assuming they're choosing, is not the government's business.

Cool Alert

Just saw a hijab/cleavage combo on a student.

Sympathy from the Devil? Nope.

I was listening to NPR this afternoon and there was John Hagee being interviewed by Terry Gross. Wrote this down on a post-it because when Hagee said it it seemed extraordinary, but the guy poops this stuff out all the time. Anyway, referring specifically to Hurricane Katrina: "All hurricanes are acts of God because God controls the heavens."

Pope a Dope

The new pope seems to be a little bit dumb, which I guess is to be expected being a pope and all, but public figures have to watch their mouths.

Still, it'd be nice for public figures to be able to say things about Islam without nitwits shooting nuns and all.

The Return of Melinda Barton

Melinda Barton is using Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins as examples of extremist atheists. Sam Harris had the temerity to assert that there was no God.

While Sam's making a claim he can't really back up, big deal. It's a safe and irrefutable bet.

The Urchin's Own: What I meant by being a Muslim fundamentalist

The Urchin's Own: What I meant by being a Muslim fundamentalist

Having a little debate about fundamentalism with a guy who appears to be nice and sincere. However, there are mythical elements to be dealt with, such as a completely consistent Qur'an and the idea that all muslims swallow everything whole and inerrant. Not the case, and a good thing too, at least for various science departments in universities throughout the Islamic world.

Rephrasing the Argument

I left this at Melinda's (that is, if it passes muster):

I'm still at a loss as to why run-at-the-mouth atheists need to have an article written about them. There's an overall subject that begs to be written about, which is simply zealotry or tribalism, and rather
than tackle the larger subject you go for the one in which you can isolate and crucify a teensy number of blowhards (like minnie mouse, who seems to require a prescription).

I saw on some network somewhere a show about The Rationalist Society, a group of people in India who perform an extraordinary service for villagers: they go from town to down performing magic tricks and show how they're done so that the villagers don't get suckered by visiting godmen who'll try to cure a potentially fatal snakebite with magic instead of medicine. Their atheism, in other words, saves lives. At the same time, it seemed to me that the documentary was evidence that they had become a tribe of their own, with rules, orthodoxy, chants, and so forth. They had become a tribe of sorts while explicitly
existing to burst the bubbles of tribal culture. (My description comes from one half-remembered documentary, so take it with a grain of salt.)

In any case, people form tribes naturally, and some people take it too much to heart and become assholes. The way to write about this in the case of atheists is not to deal with the arguments, which, even if you identify them as outrageous are rarely as ridiculous as religious arguments, but to identify X argument as the rallying point that attracts the stupids that may accrete to the atheist "cause". (Anthropologists tend not to add "this is of course bullshit" to descriptions of tribal beliefs.)

There may be other aspects of the culture that produce mindless woofing or backslapping or spittle-sprays. If there's some sort of ceremonial aspect to the behaviour (as there was under the supposedly atheistic communist regimes) point to that as evidence of tribalism.

There are chunks of this to re-write or rephrase, but I gotta go.

5 Professors Quit Religious School

The Only Source of
the Truth

PATRICK HENRY COLLEGE
5 Professors Quit Religious School
Some Complain of Academic Constraints at Loudoun Institution
By Michael Alison Chandler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 19, 2006; Page B05

Nearly a third of the faculty members at Patrick Henry College in
Loudoun County are leaving the school because of what they described
as limitations on their academic freedom, causing unusual
introspection at the politically connected Christian liberal arts
college.

They claim that Patrick Henry College, established in 2000 to attract
academically gifted home-schoolers with the hope of send them on to
work on Capitol Hill or at the White House, does not value equally
both parts of its mission: to offer students a strong biblical
perspective while educating them according to a classical liberal
arts curriculum. In one case, the professors said, faculty members
were reprimanded for writing that the Bible "is not the only source
of truth."

[...]

Melinda Barton

Whackjob.

However, what is the last refuge of a small, marginalized minority under tremendous external pressure (such as a real attack on their rights and/or rapid social/political/economic changes that result in great anxiety and fear) with limited political power? Terrorism. By the logic you've employed, Al Quaeda would pose no threat to us b/c they're not taking over a political party. Neither would the Christian Identity Movement b/c there are only 350,000 CIM members in America, Canada, and Great Britain combined, they are seriously marginalized, and they have no real political power.
Do I think "atheist extremists", or "antitheist extremists" if that works better for you, will necessarily become terrorists. No. But I also don't think we should allow tunnel vision to set in. Just b/c the enemy before us is great, doesn't mean there isn't an enemy sneaking up from behind. Remember: the religous right was once a marginalized minority within the right that the left refused to take seriously as a potential threat.

Sounds eerily Malkinish.

I'm still at a loss to find out why these atheist extremists need a good pummeling. Has the atheist extremist influence on US politics somehow reached some dangerous peak?

The now-reposted article remains bad, with those ridiculous five points and their embarrassing counter-arguments, but assuming that there are people believe who what Melinda says they believe...why pick on these particular people and not lunatics as a whole? It seems to me that ignoring the obvious overall argument (zealots of any stripe are to be avoided) to limit it to a teensy pool of people (a small subset of the already small pool of atheists) is just a way to hunt for unimportant people to demonize.

Further articles in the Extremist Subsets of the Already Ignored series could include:

Albanian Orthodox Babblers
Ashkenazy Goggle-Eyed Freaks
Foam-at-the-Mouth Baha'i
Shaker Silliness
Pagan Pinheads (Earth Goddess-focused)
More Pagan Pinheads (Non-Earth Goddess-focused)
Snakehandler Stupids
Stop Jainist Aggression Now

Melinda Barton: Whackjob

If you believe you know for certain there is no God or higher being, you're as full of shit as anyone who believes they know for certain there is. About that, Melinda is right.

Only in the most sophomoric way. People love to think of that as some sort of exploitable crack in the door of the whole atheism argument, and fortunately the Flying Spaghetti Monster fits through there as well. I can promise you I accord the same degree of respect and probability to YHWH as the FSM gets.

When dullards get offended over the idea of Godlessness, it's the vanishingly small probability of their particular God existing that they feel comforted by when the "you can't disprove it" line comes around: they're not thinking about Abdul's God or Tajinder's God or the god of some alien species somewhere. Pascal left the roulette wheel out of his wager. (Note that I am referring to unnamed and unidentifiable dullards and not all the swell people who quite reasonably feel insulted by the foregoing paragraph. Thanks Melinda!)

The Problem of Not Understanding That the Problem is Religion

Thus far I'm adding abrasive posts here.

The notion that someone is part of the problem and not part of the solution in relating to the god-addled has an irony to it: clearly the biggest problem in the whole issue is religion itself, which might, in some fantasy future, one day be solved.