No More Mr. Nice Guy's blog

Now up at No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Newspapers are always happy to give column space to religious bigwigs to opine to their hearts' contents, and normally my eyes just skip past, knowing they will have nothing particularly fresh or insightful to say. But here's a column that's different. Written by a rabbi in ultra-blood-red born-again Idaho, it forcefully denounces the Bush misadministration's lies and acts of treachery that got us bogged down in the Iraquagmire. I was most impressed with the last sentence:

May we rise up together, as Christians and Moslems and Jews and other believers and atheists and agnostics, too, and demand that we, as a nation, support our troops in the only way that really matters — by bringing them home.

The full column is here, and well worth reading.

A veteran, crippled by excruciating pain from kidney stones and 100% disabled, goes to a VA hospital for a medication refill. The doctor refuses to write a prescription, and tells the veteran: "You're a religious Jew. Why don't you try prayer and meditation?"

I have been hospitalized three times at the Iowa City VA for symptoms of angina, and all three times, while in bed, wired to a heart monitor, I have been visited by Christian Chaplains and handed Christian tracts. Twice the Assembly of God Chaplain insisted on proselytizing me - telling me about how Jesus loves me, how Jesus is the Messiah of the Jews too. And although each time I had informed the staff both verbally and in writing that I did not want to
be visited by a Chaplain, they came anyway - carrying their message of love. Each time I objected, as vigorously as I could. But the hospital's answer to my complaint regarding these visits was that I should have objected more strenuously. What am I supposed to do, hang on to my heart monitor and jump up and down?! (Link)

Welcome to today's dominionist armed forces. With the encouragement and support of the George Bush Junior regime, an extreme fundamentalist movement has hijacked the US military from the highest levels down, and is turning it into one giant faith-based tax-supported proselytizing machine, in blatant defiance of the Constitution and everything the military stands for (not to mention the Hippocratic oath, as in the above outrageous story).

This is beyond unacceptable and despicable - it's incredibly scary. The Pentagon has become the Pentacostalgon, and the Christian Taliban and its Crusaders have control of the most lethal military force the world has ever known!

Visit the Military Religious Freedom Foundation website and consider how you can help oppose this unbelievable, appalling and unacceptable assault on our freedoms and our most important institutions.

(Cross-posted at No More Mr. Nice Guy)

Every UTI blogger and reader should support this:

Blog Against Theocracy

"This is a blogswarm dedicated to the separation of church and state, which will be held Easter Weekend, April 6-8, 2007."

Make Baby Jesus weep, and give William Donohue a screaming fit of the vapors! Get writing! See you there!

Once again we see the truth of the saying that no-one ever lost a penny underestimating the intelligence of the American public. Some guy in Stockton is peddling holy drinking water that has been blessed by a local priest. Yeah, I bet Jesus walked across it too.

Hey, how come you don't hear so often about Jesus turning water into coffee? Or better still, beer?

The bottle of this blessed beverage carries a warning that a sinner who drinks the water "may experience burning, intense heat, sweating and skin irritations." And will no doubt get thrown into the lake of fire to scream forever in infinite agony, to boot. I'll tell ya one thing, anyone stupid enough to buy this scam artist's product has definitely gotten burned.

It's been a long time since my schoolboy cathechism classes, but isn't this simony? Guess I'll be sharing that lake of fire with Brian Germann, the budding entrepreneur behind this sacred sting. I have to hand it to him, though. There's so much religious stupidity out there, you might as well make a buck off it. Let's see if I can make a silhouette to fit in the toaster so I can mass-produce slices of toast with the face of Jesus on them...

This election is not about a botched Kerry joke.

It's about a botched war (two, considering that since Junior cut and run from Afghanistan, the Taliban have taken over basically everything except the Kabul green zone) that has pointlessly sacrificed thousands of our troops and trillions of our tax dollars.

It's about botched foreign policy, with Iran and North Korea going nuclear while the US is an international leper, the most hated nation on earth.

It's about a botched hunt for Osama bin Laden, whom Junior lost interest in. And botched national security, with the regime putting nuclear cookbooks on a public accessible website! Good friggin' grief! How infinitely stupid are they? This is a thousand times worse than Al Qaqaa.

It's about a botched response to the Katrina disaster, with Junior more interested in rebuilding Trent Lott's beachfront summer mansion (on our dime) than the city of New Orleans.

La Mancha (EAP): The federal government announced today that popular literary hero Don Quixote has been arrested in connection with a joint terrorism investigation by the FBI, ATF, CIA, NSA, NRA, RNC and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

In a hastily organized press conference, Attorney General Alberto "Torquemada" Gonzales announced: "Through our vigilance in the war on terror, a grave threat has been foiled and our nation's windmills are safer."

Battle Cry is undoubtedly one of the scariest developments in the ongoing nightmare/train wreck of George Bush Junior's corporatist neonazicon theocracy. Read the Daily Kos article and click on the links, and you will be horrified. A Nuremberg rally whipping up hatred against non-fundamentalists, Navy SEALS firing automatic weapons as part of the act, Junior sending a letter of support - pardon my freedom but what the fuck is happening to this country???

Equally horrifying is the fact that the "liberal media" is studiously ignoring this very dangerous and disturbing movement - apart from the Philadelphia Daily News giving Ron Luce, the organizer, free publicity to write a dishonest and misleading article suckering impressionable teens into this carnival of hatred and blood lust!

Most sickening of all is that Luce's column was published as part of a regular series: "Each Saturday the Daily News offers men and women of faith the opportunity to share their words of life and comfort with our readers." Words of death and destruction is more like it.

TUCSON, Ariz, 4/7/2110 (EAP): An early Christian manuscript has been carbon-dated by scientists at the University of Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory. The controversial document is likely to causes upheaval in the accepted story of the Son of Bush.

Okay, I've had it. Where do I sign up for the war on Christmas^TM?

Phoenix, being a cesspit of mouth-foaming religious right lunacy, has embraced the phony "war on Christmas" talking point with unseemly glee. But today's lead story in the Arizona Repulsive really goes over the top.

Note the headline: "Americans demanding end to generic holiday". And note the file name: 1210merryxmas1210.html. Good grief, they aren't even pretending to make any attempt at objective journalism! They're mindlessly regurgitating the frenzied vaporings of Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss., who is quoted favorably five times in the article. Wildmon is a stark raving insane fundy wingnut who thinks that "liberals don't have the kind of family responsibilities most people have, and certainly not church responsibilities" (Link), and sees evidence of homosexuality in HGTV and Animal Planet (Link). Like many fundy berserkers, when he isn't protecting Christmas from a non-existent war, Wildmon is waging his own war against gay people.

Vjack, a blogger in Hattiesburg, MS, and owner of Atheist Revolution, was off the net for several days following being hit by Katrina. Fortunately he is alive and well, and once again posting. He has a fascinating "Katrina log" up.

Every so often I make the mistake of reading the letters page of the "Arizona Repulsive" (as it's fondly known) and choking on some piece of unmitigated ignorance and stupidity, being seized with the urge to respond to it, and forgetting the #1 rule for preserving one's sanity: "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." Anyway, a letter in today's Repulsive (the link has already expired) on the subject of "intelligent design" set me off, and here is my response, which has no hope in hell of getting printed:

From North Pole to the swamps of the Deep South, the mouth-foaming neanderthals of the extreme fundamentalist right are still trying to force their sectarian shibboleths into every public and tax-supported space in the land. Typically, they are using dishonest arguments to do so, bleating smarmily about the historical nature of the displays, and denying their blatantly obvious intent: to promote their religion on the taxpayer's dime.

The situation is rich in irony. First of all, many of the ten commandments monuments which litter the landscape were installed in the 50's by Cecil B. De Mille, as a publicity stunt to promote his movie. Secondly, those bible thumpers don't even know their bible. They've got the wrong set of ten commandments!

If you read the book of Genesis, it turns out that there are at least three different sets of commandments, but there's only one set that the buybull itself refers to as "the" ten commandments. So, for the benefit of our fundy friends, here are the REAL ten commandments.