Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Huh. And here I thought I was part of the species.
Via PZ, the latest screed over crackergate comes from a Dallas Morning News editorial. Here's an excerpt - see if it makes your head explode:
The Eucharist is merely a "sad little cracker," Dr. Myers wrote, and the Quran nothing more than words on paper. That may be true, and no one is bound to believe that Catholics or Muslims are correct. What we are bound to do, especially in a pluralist democracy, is show basic respect for the human beings who hold beliefs we don't respect. People don't lose their dignity because they believe implausible, even offensive, things.
There's something about these new atheists, for whom P.Z. Myers is a folk hero, that's profoundly inhuman.
Yeah, you got it right: in one paragraph he states without equivocation that all people deserve respect regardless of beliefs, and in the next he says that atheists are inhuman.
What. The. Fuck?
One of the basic tools of propaganda is to dehumanize your opponents. Makes it easier to treat them as less than human. You know, as in actual imprisonment, torture, and murder. Or, I should say, makes *us* easier to imprison, torture, and murder. Because Mr. Dreher has just done that to you, me, and anyone who agrees with us. This comes as no surprise, of course, to anyone who has paid attention to what it means to be a non-believer here in the US for the last few decades. But it is not often that you see such a clear example of it from a major national newspaper.
Despicable.
Jim Downey
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You know, I've sometimes
You know, I've sometimes wondered if rationalists and irrationalists are exactly the same species. Maybe the god organ in our brain is evolving into uselessness, a mental apprendix that served the species well enough in the days when culture & learning were only transmitted via word of mouth and the population was illiterate. Now that we can learn from the mass of humanity via reading and writing (and are getting into gear with a worldwide instant communcations network) we're free view the world rationally and survival doesn't depend on our tribal elders beating the fear of supernatural vengence being visited on us for stepping out of line. After all, telling someone "Don't do this because God doesn't want you to" and stoning the nonbelievers is a fallback position in exactly the same way a parent tells a toddler not to run into the road "Because I told you so" accompanied by a smack on the fanny with no other explination given, and with the same reason - in the bad old nasty, brutish and short life days you didn't really have the luxury of finding out these things for yourself. Survival techniques would get codified into culture and passed down to the next generation with the authority of a supernatural being behind them (similar to the way Australian natives encoded a map of their harsh environment in their myths and legends).
What did you expect?
Dreher is an admitted Roman Catholic activist. Hardly a trustworthy neutral source, just because he writes an op-ed. And the problem with the RC types, or any fundy, is that they don't accept that atheists have beliefs - they see atheism as the absence of belief.
Don't forget, the RC have a long history of treating anybody who doesn't believe as they do as less than human, no matter what your set of beliefs, or lack thereof. He's just following his training.
Yep, my head just 'sploded
So it's inhuman to point out that flour and water baked into little squares don't become flesh just because you want it to, so shut the fuck up and stop threatening a young man with legal and physical punishment? It's inhuman to point out that a book with words is just a book with words, and no more holy than any other book with words, so shut the fuck up and stop threatening to kill people who don't hold your book with words in it in any particular regard?
It's inhuman to not respect people who would beat or murder someone who doesn't kiss Muhammad's pedophiliac ass? It's inhuman to not respect people who would threaten to beat or murder someone for not swallowing a cracker?
I don't know Myers that well, and have only recently (because of this blog) become really aware of him at all, but it seems to me that his point wasn't so much that he just decided to desecrate the Jeezit and the Koran. It seems to me that his point was to show how foolish it is for these groups to get so wrapped up in their symbols that the symbols are more important than people.
I consider myself fairly patriotic; I stand and remove my hat for the National Anthem and consider what the flag stands for and reflect on that during the process. I treat the flag respectively, as prescribed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice (being a veteran and all.) But I would never put that flag before a human, or most other animal, life. I would never become so enraged at someone who burned, or spit on it that I would want to physically assault them in any way.
And if my intolerance of someone who does hold any symbol in higher regards than people means I'm inhuman, then I wouldn't want to be related to an ass-hat like Rod Dreher anyway.
Rob Miles
--
There are only 10 types of people in the world;
those who understand binary and those who don't.
Re: The Flag
Very well said!
One of the things I've hated all my life is the way some people get hung up on the SYMBOL, and ignore the IDEA behind it.
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