We’ve Escaped!

We’ve been offline, relocating about 1,500 miles to the north. We no longer live in the Buckle of the Bible Belt (or anywhere near it). Now we’re in an area where tolerance of diversity is a value, where intellectual freedom is a given, where education is a priority rather than a threat to religious faith.

I look forward to the transformation this will bring about in our lives and in my work (and in our very selves, for I’m certain that one’s location has a bigger affect than we realize on one’s sense of self). We’d lived in our former city in Louisiana for almost ten years. I knew going into it that it wasn’t going to be a comfortable cultural fit. We’ve chosen our new home with the culture in mind. I’m so glad our children are going to be able to come of age here, rather than there.

2008 Is Going to Be a Very Strange Year

After we invaded Iraq, I repeated at the forums I frequent the phrase, “Is it 2004 yet?” to sum up what I felt. Silly me, I actually assumed the American people would have the sense to evict these liars from the White House.

It was too depressing to follow that with “Is it 2008 yet?” Not only did it seem way too far away, but now I have no confidence that the American people will have the sense to vote for change.

The only candidate I see who could offer real change is Dennis Kucinich, and, as usual, he’s hardly in the running, because he has common sense, and I’ve found there’s nothing actually common about common sense, and it’s not something the American people seem to appreciate in their politicians.

Now, we’ve got Obama, whom half the nuts in the country think is part of the Illuminati (a group that doesn’t really exist anymore, and never did anything real while they did — the OTO and the Golden Dawn accomplished much more in terms of opening up possibilities for astral exploration, for example), Clinton (talk about more of the same — egads, having the legal and insurance lobby running things? no thanks), Romney, who’ll never be elected because he’s Mormon (a religion many Christians don’t recognize as part of their club), and Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher (please save us from such a fate…having lived 13 years in the Bible Belt where Southern Baptists behave like Hilter’s brown-shirts in their evangelical zeal, I can’t imagine what would happen with one of theirs in charge). And McCain. Well, at least he’s been to war, and doesn’t approve of torture. But something about him doesn’t seem quite right, either.

Last night I finished reading Milan Kundera’s excellent book The Curtain, an essay in seven parts on the history of the art of the novel. It’s fascinating, and of course, as an escapee from Czechoslovakia after the Soviets invaded, he’s got real perspective on the importance and relevance of politics on people’s daily lives (and deaths) — he knows that when things go badly, artists are often eliminated by the powers that be. It makes me glad to live in America, where we do have some small protections, but I don’t take such things for granted. I don’t put it past Big Money to assassinate uppity poets.

One of his themes is the omnipresence of stupidity. And boy is he ever right. Folks are stupid. What really scares me about the current situation, though, is that the stupid have been in charge for so long now in America, they don’t seem to want to give up power even though they’re running the country into the ground. What is this distrust of intelligence? Why wasn’t Kerry elected? Why won’t Kucinich be elected?

I guess I’m going to buy a farm and live far away from people, and watch, like Robinson Jeffers did, while the stupid people of this country continue to elect stupid men who will continue to behave stupidly and make America the fool of the world.

Dominionism and the Religious Right: Somebody Save the Constitution!

Here’s an incredible article written by someone who managed to extricate herself from her fundamentalist upbringing. It’s published at The Dissident Voice, something new for the blogroll (and maybe a potential market!). This is the meaty part:

Today, as I witness the possibility of losing the last shreds of liberty to a fundamentalist theocracy, I am reminded once again of my college research paper and how “dangerous” research, critical thinking, and asking the right questions can be. All those years ago, I extricated myself from the fundamentalist Christian programming of my family and subculture, and now I am watching it threaten to engulf my entire country.

To even attempt to understand the religious right, which many are now naming “Dominionism”, one must grasp the mental duress it holds on its followers. I should know; I was one of them. Axiomatic in the worldview of the fundamentalist, born-again Christian is: “I have the truth, I’m right; you don’t have the truth, you’re wrong.” As a result, critical thinking, research, or intellectual freedom of exploration are not only unnecessary, they are dangerous and potentially heretical. Paul Krugman noted in a recent article that while the religious right bashes academia for its “liberal bias,” studies of the political persuasions of college and university professors indicate that persons who prefer academia as a lifelong career tend to be more liberal, just as those who prefer the military as a lifelong career tend to be more conservative. The halls of academia do not spawn the likes of Tim LaHaye or Pat Robertson. Remember, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

But simply shunning critical thinking does not make one a terrorist. What does, however, is the notion that because one “has the truth” and everyone else who believes differently is “wrong”, those individuals will be condemned to spend eternity in hell and must be incessantly reminded of their fate and their “inferior” status in the eyes of God. Moreover, because of one’s “superior” spiritual status, one has the so-called “divine authority” to subvert, by whatever means necessary, the very machinery of government in order to establish a theocracy in which one’s worldview is predominant.

When sufficiently pressed, Christian fundamentalists intractably argue that people are poor because they have not been born again. Like the Puritans of seventeenth-century America, wealth is a sign that one is following the will of God, and poverty indicates that one is not. People are poor because they are doing something to cause themselves to be poor, and whatever that may be, the underlying cause is that they do not have a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” Increasingly, one sees many faces of color in fundamentalist congregations, but those individuals are almost without exception, born-again Christians who tow the dominionist line with other people of color.

Dominionism deplores the mental health system. Like those who are poor, the mentally ill would not be so if they were born again Christians. After all, mental illness is a label given by the Dr. Phils of the world to people whose minds have been devoured by Satan. What they really need is Christian conversion and of course, a great deal of medication from the pharmaceutical lobby. The only valid therapist is Jesus; down with Oprah, God bless Joyce Meyer. Obviously, according to Dominionism, government should not be financing mental health programs.

And what about addictions? In case you haven’t caught on to the drill yet, Jesus is the answer to that one as well. Who needs a Twelve-Step program? There’s only one step: Accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior as soon as possible, and your addictions will be erased faster than those eighteen minutes on the Richard Nixon tapes. (Remind me to write another article on the religious right AS an addiction.)

Christian fundamentalism in “cafeteria style” has chosen which parts of Jesus’ teachings it chooses to honor and which not. Preference is always given to the “I am” passages such as those in the Gospel of John in which Jesus says, “ I am the door; the bread of life; the way, the truth, and the life; the light of the world; the living water,” and so on, supposedly claiming to be God and commanding his listeners to accept him as the only way to live forever with God in heaven and escape eternity in hell. Little attention is given to the Sermon on the Mount and the many passages where Jesus condemns the wealthy and the religious leaders of his time for their callous, hypocritical, mean-spirited absence of compassion. In fact, theologians who pay much attention to Jesus’ teachings on compassion are viewed as bleeding hearts, unorthodox, and not really Christian. For this reason, Pat Robertson stated on his 700 Club program, January 14, 1991: “You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don’ have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.”

Let us not overlook the obvious: Dominionism is about dominion — over women, children, the poor, people of color, alternative sexual orientations, and the earth. It fits so nicely with fascist tyranny.

Christian fundamentalism is fundamentally UN-American. Dominonists clearly desire a revised United States Constitution that will institute a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. As Katherine Yurica has so assiduously reported, the Dominionist agenda would shred the Constitution and end the democratic republic our Deist founding fathers hammered out for five grueling months in 1787 in Philadelphia.

In fact, Pat Robertson believes that only Christian people should interpret and benefit from the Constitution. Again, on his 700 Club, December 30, 1981, he stated that, “The Constitution of the United States, is a marvelous document for self-government by Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society.” Never mind that most of the founding fathers did not consider themselves Christian and clearly, adamantly, and unequivocally defended the right of everyone in America to believe — or not believe, as he/she chooses.

I hope Americans outside the Bible Belt become more aware that reasonable people down here are being suppressed. It’s an insidious threat. A lawyer I enjoy at another forum calls it the American Christian Taliban. I think that’s not a bad label, with all the appropriate connotations. Except that they are really quite unAmerican, which is why I prefer Christianofascists.

Majutsu sez…

“Americans want science confined to a money-making box, not wandering in church asking questions.” We had a big discussion about labels today, whether I ought to call myself an atheist or a secular humanist, or one of my own making, which I’ve been using and which my former mentor says he likes: agnostic secularist.

And it’s not that I’m not sure whether or not there’s a personal deity. I know that’s not so. Or at least I’m confident enough to consider people like Richard Dawkins to be perfectly reasonable, if somewhat impatient with people who value their heritage more than the need to feel 100% rational. Personally, for example, I think it’s just fine that some Christians and some Jews and even some Muslims have managed to pare away the extraneous BS of superstition and ignorance and cultural overlay to find the core of their faiths, which have enough truth to them (the smallness and insignificance of the individual as compared to the Whole, the importance of kindness and the other virtues, etc.) to be valuable when taken with a grain of salt (and never, ever insist that anyone agree with your take! enough evangelism, already, which ought to be called dominionism, at this point…let’s call a spade a spade). Heck, we even used the Bible recently to illustrate a point to our kids (the parable of the Good Samaritan, which has political connotations lost on most of us…). But I like using “agnostic” to say that I am not certain. That I’m not saying I know what happens when you die, or how the world came to be (I mean, I know life evolved, but I’m talking about what happened in the millisecond preceding the Big Bang), but that I do not know and further I don’t consider it important. What IS important is secularism. That religion and government remain forever separate. Religion is just too personal a choice to be legislated. Period. And the problems we all face together as one species on this beleaguered planet, problems of our own making that require solutions other than war OR prayer.

But back to Maj’s statement about science, it’s so true. These folk love science so long as it’s making them money. They gladly embrace it while it fills their coffers, but badmouth it if it seems to contradict the religious tenets that give them power. Another six weeks or so, and we escape the Bible Belt. I can’t tell you how eager I am.

Ann Coulter Is a Cunt

WARNING: MATURE CONTENT

Sometimes it’s more fun to be mad than sad, so since I got an email from a democratic candidate (how I got on these lists I don’t know, since I’m not a democrat, actually) about this woman I’ve long detested, I just thought I’d let y’all know how I feel.

Ann Coulter is a cock-worshiping cunt. I bet she has fantasies about taking three at a time. I bet Cheney has fantasies about getting a Cleveland steamer from her, that scat-muncher.

That woman gives women a bad name. I wish she’d get cancer and lose that well-maintained head of bleached hair. I wish she’d get a tumor that takes out her verbal center, so she can choke on her hate in silence, unable to write or speak another word. I won’t wish her dead, since women in my family have a history of having such wishes come true, but I’ll dance the day her death is announced, that’s for damn sure.

Universal love? It’s a nice idea, but I’m only human, after all, and Ann Coulter’s an individual the species can definitely do without.

God is Not Great: Excellent Excerpt at Slate

Here’s one of three excerpts from Christopher Hitchens’s book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I haven’t read the other two yet, but this was so good I had to post it here.

A little bit to whet your appetite:

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way—one might cite Pascal—and some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis—both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to “fit” with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then—after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty—to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

Here’s a Funny One…

Here’s a good one from the American Atheist newsletter (I get it emailed to me).

President George W. Bush was scheduled to visit the Episcopal Church
outside Washington as part of his campaign to restore his poll
standings.

Bush’s campaign manager made a visit to the Bishop, and said to him,
“We’ve been getting a lot of bad publicity because of the president’s
position on stem cell research, the Iraq war, Katrina, and the like.
We’d gladly make a contribution to the church of $100,000 if during
your sermon you’d say the President is a saint.”

The Bishop thought it over for a few moments and finally said, “The
Church is in desperate need of funds and I will agree to do it.”

Bush showed up for the sermon and the Bishop began:

“I’d like to speak to you all this morning about our President.
George Bush is a liar, a cheat, and a low-intelligence weasel.

He took the tragedy of September 11 and used it to frighten and
manipulate the American people. He lied about weapons of mass
destruction and invaded Iraq for oil and money, causing the deaths of
tens of thousands and making the United States the most hated country
on Earth.

“He appointed cronies to positions of power and influence, leading to
widespread death and destruction during Hurricane Katrina. He awarded
contracts and tax cuts to his rich friends so that we now have more
poverty in this country, and a greater gap between rich and poor, than
we’ve had since the Depression. He instituted illegal wiretaps when
getting a warrant from a secret court would have been a mere
administrative detail, had his henchmen lie to Congress about it, then
claimed he is above the law.

“He has headed the most corrupt, bribe-inducing political party since
Teapot Dome. The national surplus has turned into a staggering
national debt of 7.6 trillion dollars, gas prices are up 85%, and
vital research into global warming and stem cells is stopped cold
because he’s afraid to lose votes from some religious kooks.

“He is the worst example of a true Christian I’ve ever known.

But compared to Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, George Bush is a saint.”

(Thanks to Monty Gaither in Arizona for this - ed.)

Let’s Stop a War before it Starts

Thanks to Homeyra for emailing me this link. Here’s a blog that’s got the right idea: let’s send messages to the folks behind the scenes who are agitating for war, telling them to “think again.”

As I commented over at my friend Monte’s blog, the resistance to the invasion of Iraq marked the first time in history that the people have protested a war before it even started. Maybe we’ll actually be able to stop one this time.

I don’t know about my fellow Americans, but I for one am not going to stand silently by while my government bombs more brown people for profit. This fascism has to end. So many have commented about the German people’s tolerance of Nazism. How is history going to paint us?

Introducing Majutsu, My Husband

He posted this in a comment to my last post, but I thought this deserved to be read on its own:

You know what’s really funny? That this show ["The Lost Tomb of Jesus"] was widely watched and has generated a lot of curiosity and interest in jesus and his teachings. This interest has been generated in precisely those far removed from christ, such as atheists, the very nihilistic, those least reached in the last twenty or so years. If a christian cared about lost souls, they would approach this like follows, “It’s good to see you so excited about jesus the man. Don’t you wonder now what he taught and why so many base their life on his teachings? Why don’t you come to our church and talk about jesus and his life?” Oddly enough though, at a time when a couple hundred thousand to a million people, formerly very closed to god and christ, were opened up all at once and thirsting for knowledge about the teachings of jesus, how were they rewarded? By being reminded in the press and blogs that christians could give two shits about saving people. They want to condemn, to damn to eternal fire, the producer, the archaeologist, the network. . . They were reminded that christians want only to micro-control thought and other people’s lives. The proof is the opportunity for dialog that was lost — ignored. We may conclude from this that there is apparently no christian joy or close relationship with the divine to share. There really is only perpetual hatred and a false sense of self built on enjoying, with fantastic embellished imagery, the control and torment of others. Christianity is after the religion of the Roman Empire, the worship of jesus and the holy roman emperor in rome as divine. And the Romans were the Nazis of the ancient world. True to their heritage as cruel tyrants, the faithful christians walled themselves up, covering their eyes and ears, shrieking that their sole possession, their tattered rags of borrowed thoughts, was being dragged into the street, leaking out of the control of their balled little fists. Unfortunately for the christian, if there is a god, she sends rain down to the good and the evil. To wish your neighbor to be parched and dying of thirst every time it rains means that with every single drop that falls you again fail the ultimate test of faith, to be willing to be part of this one life, this being. This is the sort of sin that really matters, not violating undecipherable precepts of rotting books.

Ain’t that the truth.

Illuminati’s Plan

My husband tells me that the conspiracy theory goes like this:

After prepping the world with The Da Vinci Code, now they disclose these bodies. Next, they disclose that the bloodline never died out, and here he is, folks, the direct heir of Christ, and he’s gonna rule the world.

Of course, that would never work. If history has proven anything, it’s that neither intelligence nor nobility are necessarily inherited.