Shit that Pissed me Off This Week – 5/11
The Heartland Institute Goes for Broke on a New Series of Billboards
The Heartland Institute is a Climate Change Denial think tank and they just put up a series of billboards to support their point of view. Let’s see if you can tell why the campaign pisses me off:
OMG!!! He’s crazy! I don’t want to be crazy too!!!
They also have billboards planned featuring Charles Manson and Osama Bin Laden.
You know, because only crazy people believe that Climate Change is real and caused by human behavior. It is a spurious and insulting argument that has nothing to do with facts or science.
You think 97% of the world’s climate scientists are wrong? Prove it!!! Don’t waste time saying that they must be wrong because some crackpot out there believes them. It’s like saying that I shouldn’t be against the death penalty because most prisoners on death row are also against the death penalty.
Update: after extensive public outcry, they have decided to take down the billboards. They haven’t apologized for them, of course, but they took ’em down…
Shit that Pissed me off this Week – 5/4
Football Coach would be “Honored” if he was Fired for Anti-Gay Rhetoric
Never fails. I post “Shit that Pissed me Off” and I immediately see something else. This story is a week old but it still pisses me off.
He says that if he is fired for anti gay language, he’d be honored to be “fired for his faith.” This in spite of the fact that there is very dubious evidence for using the bible as an excuse to hate on gay people.
He’s not going to be fired because of his faith. He’s going to be fired because he has chosen very specific passages from a badly translated book to support a prejudice he already had. Then he communicates it to a bunch of kids who look at him as an authority figure.
Not so Serenely Accepting that Which I Cannot Change
My son Alex is a Boy Scout and he really enjoys it. He very much wants to make it all the way to Eagle Scout and I want to support him on his journey. They have been so anxious to work with his social challenges and find ways that he can be included in the group. Every moment he’s spent with scouts has helped me to ignore the misgivings I have about the Boy Scouts of America.
And yet, I do have misgivings. Primary among them is their unflinching policy when it comes to gays and lesbians involved in their organization.
Why the Right Answer is Better than a Comforting One
One of the things that bugs me, when I stop to think about it, is the finality of death. I believe that when we die, that’s it. Whoever we were and whatever we did will be remembered for some indeterminate length of time but we won’t know it.
Our consciousness, however we define it, is finite.
Hiding your Tribe – Part 2
The same day I posted this blog entry about the difference between assholes and atheists, I read this story over at The Friendly Atheist and I wondered who would look at this kid as an asshole and who wouldn’t.
His school, which is located in the bible belt, had a “come dressed as your favorite fictional character day” and he chose to come dressed as Jesus.
Now before any of us start to debate whether or not it was a good call, you have to admit that was pretty ballsy.
Hiding one’s tribe
I was reading this article over at the Friendly Atheist and I thought “you know, this is exactly why I kept my opinions about god to myself for so long.”
Basic gist of the story (for those who don’t click through): A Government banquet includes a fairly mild prayer. Being a government function, there should not be a denominational prayer of any kind. An atheist in attendance gets pretty damned angry and writes a letter.
The Mayor says “I’m sorry – we didn’t think about that” and suggests some solutions. The atheist becomes obstinate and demands a public apology.
If we were talking about a prayer before a City Council meeting, I’d be on board with this guy’s anger because church and state are supposed to be separate in our country. If you want God to give you a hand with your political decisions, you need to ask him for that help on your own, thank you very much.
What happened here is much less troublesome. It calls for a more measured response and I fear the response was over the top.
I think some atheists read about guys like this and decide that it would be best if they hide their opinions. My own impression was that most atheists I knew were assholes. This impression is aped by many others and it made it easy for me to continue with that erroneous assumption.
Not wanting to be associated with a group that was known for being assholes, I decided I’d hide my tribal affiliation because while I could agree with their core belief, I couldn’t agree with how they were expressing it. Well – I couldn’t agree with how I thought they were expressing it.
I mean, I’d never throw a fit over a brief prayer at a banquet. I’d be annoyed by it but it seems like such a small issue that it wouldn’t be worth more than a casual “please try not to do that” comment. To me, this guy feels like – well – an asshole.
I would look at a guy like this and because I didn’t want to be that kind of atheist, I resisted being any kind of atheist.
As if the simple act of concluding that there is no god would turn me into someone who I was not.
The problem here is that there is a belief – even amongst a lot of atheists – that the worst thing atheists can do is talk about being atheists. We think we look like jerks because we don’t buy what the church is selling. As long as we quietly disbelieve and avoid making waves, it’ll all be OK.
Except it isn’t OK. I’m not OK with someone claiming this is a Christian nation because I’m a citizen and I’m not Christian. They don’t get to force me to live by their rules because there are more of them. That is exactly the kind of thing this country is supposed to be fighting against.
Somewhere along the line, it occurred to me that being an atheist doesn’t make you an asshole. Being an asshole makes you an asshole.
As frustrating as it can be at times, religion is everywhere and there are times when it is appropriate and OK (non-governmental functions/functions in church), times when it is inappropriate and not OK (like when you hang a prayer banner in a public high school) and times when it is inappropriate and probably not a big deal (like a milquetoast prayer at a banquet).
When a guy goes ballistic about little things, it makes a lot of people say “see? Atheists are assholes!” They ignore the fact that members of the religious right have a persecution complex and so they try to make sure they don’t get persecuted by persecuting everyone else.
I dont know the guy in the article. Maybe he’s a good guy who has just had enough. Even if he is, though, I think he’s tilting the wrong windmill.
Being an “out” atheist doesn’t mean you have to fight every bit of religion in our world. There is too much of it. I think you need to fight the parts that are dangerous. Like the Catholic Church’s assault on gay marriage or the push for creationism in public schools. Any time we go after the small stuff, we just alienate the believers who could be on our side.
And here’s the thing – most atheists know that. As I’ve come to realize, there are a whole lot of atheists in my life and they are all really cool people who also happen to be atheists.
My choice to “come out” was all about realizing that it didn’t matter that some atheists were assholes because they did not define atheism. They were only defining themselves.
NOTE: The incident that inspired my blog actually happened in Canada. While my statements about separation of Church and State still hold true for America, it was wrong of me to imply that Canadian and American law are the same on the subject. Let me say, though, that I think church and state should be separate everywhere. Canadian or American, though, I still think the guy was kind of a jerk.
Shit that Pissed me off this Week – 4/20
Catholic Bishops get together to whine about how misunderstood they all are
In the wake of all the work the Catholic church has been doing against women and homosexuals lately, they decided they needed to complain about the lack of religious freedom in the United States.
As always, the Church only gets pissed off when the government tells them to do something (like provide health plans that actually benefit women). As soon as they want to tell the government what to do (like pass anti-gay marriage ammendments), the story is a little different.
Shit that Pissed me off This Week – 4/13
The Leader of the Russian Orthodox Church Lies to the Press about a Watch
Patriarch Krill I, the religious leader of millions of people, was photographed wearing a watch reputed to be worth over $30,000. In a country where that exceeds the annual income of most households, that’s a pretty big deal.
So then, the picture is photoshopped to make the watch go away. That doesn’t work because they forget to get rid of the watch’s reflection. How do you say “d’oh” in Russian?
D'ohsvidonia!
The church apologizes for the incident and calls it a “technical mistake.” With me so far?
So the Patriarch decides to take his asshattery just one step too far and he denies that he’s ever worn the watch, going so far as to claim that any picture showing him wearing the watch has been photoshopped.
He doesn’t say something like “yes, the watch was a gift and I liked it so much, I kept it rather than selling it” or “holy shit! It’s worth how much?? I had not idea!”
No, he says he’s never worn the damn thing and that there are a bunch of conspiracy theorists running around the internet gleefully cackling as they maliciously put watches on every picture they find. “That’ll show ‘im,” they laugh, “now the world will think he’s a materialistic scuzzbag when he’s actually not!”
The reality is the dude has been wearing the watch and rather than fess up, he lied about it. The leader of one of the most powerful churches in Russia lied.
About a fucking watch.
Side note: The dudes name is really “Krill?” I’ll bet whales scare the shit out of him.
Alphabetical Movie – Hotel Rwanda
Hotel Rwanda is a mercifully sanitized account of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. I say mercifully because I can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch as many as a million men, women and children hacked to death with machetes. After some amount of time, things would start to get a little bleak.
In all the talk about how Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot were atheists, you would think that all of the senseless killing in the 20th century was perpetrated by atheists. We are the scourge of the planet, mercilessly wiping out those who would oppose us by believing in god.
Shit that Pissed me off this week – 4/6
Michelle Dugar thinks Overpopulation is “not accurate”
The mother of 19 indicates she doesn’t know very much about – well – anything when she says that the entire population of the world could fit inside Jacksonville, Florida.
If we are going by sheer volume of people, she may be right. I don’t know. What I do know is that they would still have to live somewhere and they would still need to be fed and they would need someone to produce clothes for them and….you get the idea.
She shows that having the ability to count to 19 does not mean she has the ability to do math.
Grail Diary 