Shit that Pissed me off This Week – 11/23
Conservative Christian Commenter Shows Remarkable Lack of Knowledge about Nature
We haven’t gotten a lot of comments from right-wing Christians over at Geeks Without God yet. I guess we haven’t quite hit the big time. I’m sure that we may eventually be awash in commenters telling us we are going to hell but we’ll need to have patience for that. Someday we will be truly famous on the internet!
We did get a comment this week and what annoys me is not the comment, but the tremendous level of ignorance that it contains while being only a paragraph long.
If you are going to argue that homosexuality is unnatural, don’t start by arguing that it doesn’t happen in nature. Because it does.
No really! It was an accident! We just tried to have sex with her at the exact same time!
Now as a whacked out conservative Christian, you have all sorts of articles that will try to make the argument that sure, homosexuality occurs in other animals, but it doesn’t count. So why deny homosexual behavior exists in wild animals when you can just make excuses for it?
Please note that last link takes you to Coservapedia so beware: that way lies madness.
The point here is that the argument is useless obfuscation. Who cares if homosexuality occurs in other species? Birds can fly. Fish can breathe underwater. Humans can’t. Different species do different things that are completely natural. The presumption that homosexuality is a behavior that is somehow the only thing an animal species does that is counter to the natural order defies logic.
Humans, in fact, do a ton of stuff other animals don’t or can’t do. There is no presumption that most of those things are unnatural. Homosexuality gets special attention because one passage in a very long book has been given far too much relevance.
A Christmas Gift for your Favorite Atheist!
So I’ve been doing a little writing about Atheist Voices of Minnesota over the last few months. Geeks Without God did a podcast about it. I took part in a public reading.
And I was just told that the book has sold a respectable 500 copies, which means that it has recouped publishing costs! Sweet!
But hey, with holidays coming up, it’s a great time to give your favorite atheist some reading material. So if you are so inclined, just grab a copy of this charming little ad and send a subtle “hey – check this out” e-mail to someone who might be interested in giving you a book.
At this point, 100% of all sales go directly to Minnesota Atheists so while there are no Black Friday deals for the book, you can feel good because your purchase price is going to a good cause.
Shit that Pissed me Off This Week – 11/16
This is not all of the members of the Wisconsin Legislature, mind you. Just nine of them. One of them says the Affordable care act is “unconstitutional” (even though the Supreme Court said it wasn’t) and that is his justification for supporting a law that would get a federal employee arrested for trying to do his job.
You can’t make something unconstitutional by saying so. That isn’t the way the system works. If it did, I’d say the Citizens’ United ruling was unconstitutional and Super Pac’s would be instantly dissolved.
As a lawmaker, you don’t get to pick which laws you follow. That’s not the job you got hired to do.
You can try to change laws. You can try to make laws better. You can’t decide that the supreme court got it wrong (even if you believe they did) and then start enacting laws based on what you think they should have ruled.
Aw fuck it! We can just assume that whoever wrote the dissent got it right, can’t we?
Either you believe in our system of government and you work within the rules or you shouldn’t have run for office.
New Geeks Without God – now With More Liquor
This weeks Geeks Without God was recorded live at Omegacon and we were pretty drunk. Actually, Nick and Molly were pretty drunk. So drunk, in fact, that I think it is fair to qualify that we were all drunk even though I technically wasn’t drunk at all. We recorded in front of a live audience and shared booze with them. I even tried some. Boy was that a mistake.
We talk about games and movies and a little bit about the gay marriage amendment. Also annoying mega churches. There’s a little bit for everyone! Please listen!
Shit that Pissed me off This Week – 11/9
Pakistani Couple Killed Their Daughter Because She Looked at a Boy
A 15-year-old girl looked at a boy on a motorcycle twice. Her parents feared she was going to turn out like her older sister who had already “disgraced” the family. She promised she wouldn’t do it again but it was too late because her mother had already thrown acid on her.
The good news is that her parents figure it was her destiny to die like that. It wasn’t really their fault, you see. They were just tools of destiny.
It was also apparently her destiny to die because her parents waited almost 12 hours to take her to the hospital after they threw acid on her face. They would have taken her right away, you see, but it was her destiny to wait.
Let’s be clear: religious fanaticism didn’t kill that girl.
But it sure didn’t help keep her alive, either.
Shit that Pissed me off This Week – 11/2
Crazy Christians Claim Hurricane Sandy is the Wrath of God
Any time a random act of nature affects human beings, god is getting all up in our face for something, according to the crazy wing of the Religious Right.
Now why god flooded the east coast is up for debate. It might be gay marriage. I could have something to do with Israel. It could have something to do with the fact that it is a coast and getting hammered by a storm once in a while is about as likely as floods happening on flood plains.
If you look really closely at the cloud formation, you can see god flipping off the east coast.
Once again, why believe that God is such a colossal dick? Why would he put the lives of believers at risk? There are, unquestionably, a large number of New Yorkers who don’t support gay marriage. So god is punishing them because they didn’t oppose gay marriage hard enough?
When can we all settle down and accept that natural events are not the act of a vengeful god?
At the very least, can you all have a conversation and figure out what he’s punishing us for before you start talking out of your collective asses?
Shit that Pissed me Off This Week – 10/26
Yes, that’s right, let’s discourage people from being seismologists by threatening them with imprisonment if they don’t do a good enough job predicting Earthquakes. You know, because their job is to be perfect about something we know we can’t accurately predict.
And when they get it wrong, we can hold them accountable when people die.
By god, someone will PAY FOR THIS!!!!
You know, because it makes sense to hold people accountable for an act of nature.
The next time some idiot decides to jump into freezing cold rapids at Yosemite National Park and they die as a result, we should sue the Federal Government because they didn’t give the guy an IQ test at the gate, right?
Life isn’t fair. Anyone who says Differently is Selling Something.
Over the weekend, I went to a Minnesota Atheist meeting in Minneapolis to hear Stephanie Svan speak on justice in a “just world.”
Her talk coincided with a Christian posting a comment on my Inherit the Wind blog in which she said, in part:
I don’t feel my children are growing up ignorant because we teach them that they are gifts on loan from God to us, and they are loved and cared for by parents and a God who loves them dearly and has an awesome plan and purpose for their lives.
If I had a fundamental objection to religion, it is this idea that god has a “plan” for us. It plays into this idea that the universe is inherently a “fair” place. Yet the facts suggest that this is not the case.
Shit that Pissed me off This Week – 10/19
Academic Men Explain Things to Me Tumblr
I shouldn’t read these pages. Yes, most men are not misogynist pricks who talk down to women at every opportunity but far too many of them are.
Ladies, if I’ve ever said anything this shitty to you, I sincerely apologize. I’ll try to do better.
Here’s my favorite:
I was at a conference outside my field (I am in Women’s Studies), and a male undergraduate came up to me, saw the department name on my tag, and told me, “no offense, but Women’s Studies is a dead field. It’s built on a fundamentally sexist premise, so it was only a matter of time before you killed yourselves.” Thanks?
Hey everyone, rule of etiquette number one: if you ever need to preface what you say with “no offense,” what you are about to say is really fucking offensive.
Shit that Pissed me off this Week – 10/12
I honestly wonder if the dude even reviews law before he makes rulings. His most recent comments seem to state that since anti-sodomy laws were on the books for 200 years, that makes them constitutional.
I guess we can be pretty certain he’s not going to be terribly supportive of marriage equality, is he?
See, I understand that there are different legal interpretations of a lot of things but what I don’t understand is how one dude who is so clearly an asshole who doesn’t give a shit about anything except making sure corporations can spend money however they please can have so much power over the rest of us. Yeah, he’s one of nine but he’s one vote you can always count on.
And by that I mean, ask yourself how a jackass would rule on any particular topic and you can bet Scalia will vote that way.
Not that kind of jackass!
Grail Diary 