Nobody’s There…

I’ve always thought that the loudest Christians are usually nattering on about things for their own financial benifit rather than concern with spiritual matters. “Make a Mint Ministries.” Now we have proof of one… or at least one that it bases its website on a financial frame.  Janet Folger of Faith2action on WorldNewsNet blogs on and on about her willingness to go to prison for her beliefs. The article is written with that desperateness for a jolt of righteousness, so much so that it twists an interpretation from the law like a hobo squeezing Sterno through a sock for a quick cheap drink.   Are you ready? Here we go!

The Ku Klux Klan can march. The Nazis can hand out brochures. Skinheads can do whatever it is that Skinheads do. But in the state of Colorado, the only group who is NOT allowed to be heard is … the Christians. They’re the ones who disagree with same-sex marriage, cohabitation, and believe the biblical view that homosexuality is a sin. But if they voice that objection from now on, it had better be inside the four walls of a church. If not, they’ll be staring at the four walls of a prison cell … for up to a year.

… quite incorrect!   Then I notice that instead of offering connections to other blog entries that may be of interest the postcript is :-

“Special offer? Point proven?   

In an amazing statement today Edward Gordon writes on his blog, Christian Cross Talk, that he has given up the argument for the existance of god. 

He states that he no longer willing to debate the issue and says,

The arguments for God are on the website, and that’s my token participation in the great debate of the Divine, but I don’t need secular proof of God, and those who do aren’t ready for a discussion of faith and miracles.

Now he’s only willing to debate stuff like “holiness” and “faith” calling the debate “…a satanic distraction.”

This was an interesting site for a while but I would guess that he’s been so unable to counter the strong arguments of his co-debators that he’s given up.

Many Christians do this in order to preserve their faith in the face of real chalenge.

My bet is that it won’t be long before he moves over into another camp.

PS Incorrectly spelled headline corrected thanks to Tommykey!

I do like a good, old fashioned bare knuckle fight.

I like waiting for it. Discussing and comparing the relative abilities of the contestants. 

Most of all I like to watch overweight loudmouthed has-beens getting whipped by a smart newcomer who has trained and wants the fight. Wants it so badly that they’ll put up a good display. Bloodthirsty, yep, I am. 

I’m looking forward to the courts refereeing on the following impending punch up and I know who I’ll be shouting for.

COLUMBIA — The Senate passed a bill today that would allow displays in public buildings of the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer as historical documents.

Senate bill allows display of Lord’s Prayer, 10 Commandments | GreenvilleOnline.com | The Greenville News

I presume the Lord’s Prayer will look like this:-

ΠΑΤΕΡ ΗΜΩΝ Ο ΕΝ ΤΟΙΣ ΟΥΡΑΝΟΙΣ
ΑΓΙΑΣΘΗΤΩ ΤΟ ΟΝΟΜΑ ΣΟΥ 
ΕΛΘΕΤΩ Η ΒΑΣΙΛΕΙΑ ΣΟΥ
ΓΕΝΗΘΗΤΩ ΤΟ ΘΕΛΗΜΑ ΣΟΥ,
ΩΣ ΕΝ ΟΥΡΑΝΩ ΚΑΙ ΕΠΙ ΤΗΣ ΓΗΣ
ΤΟΝ ΑΡΤΟΝ ΗΜΩΝ ΤΟΝ ΕΠΙΟΥΣΙΟΝ
ΔΟΣ ΗΜΙΝ ΣΗΜΕΡΟΝ
ΚΑΙ ΑΦΕΣ ΗΜΙΝ ΤΑ ΟΦΕΙΛΗΜΑΤΑ ΗΜΩΝ,
ΩΣ ΚΑΙ ΗΜΕΙΣ ΑΦΙΕΜΕΝ ΤΟΙΣ ΟΦΕΙΛΕΤΑΙΣ ΗΜΩΝ
ΚΑΙ ΜΗ ΕΙΣΕΝΕΓΚΗΣ ΗΜΑΣ ΕΙΣ ΠΕΙΡΑΣΜΟΝ,
ΑΛΛΑ ΡΥΣΑΙ ΗΜΑΣ ΑΠΟ ΤΟΥ ΠΟΝΗΡΟΥ.
ΑΜΗΝ.

and the commandments - depending on which version, there are several - like this:-

It’s a commonly held moral principle among atheists that if you do something wrong you should do something right to try and compensate. Christians prefer to apologize to god and then lay back while the effects of their actions ricochet around the world.

If I have a half an hour to spare my worst side comes out. Remember where in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”  Ford Prefect explains “teasers” to Arthur Dent?

“A teaser?”
“Yeah.”
“Er, what is …”
“A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.”
“Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him.
“Yeah”, said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae on their heads and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really.” Ford leant back on the mattress with his hands behind his head and looked infuriatingly pleased with himself. 

….well that’s what I do. On Christian Chat rooms. It is such fun and extremely enlightening.

Last week for example I was chatting with a born again drug dealer. The guy had peddled crack cocaine and crystal, fathered three children that he’d abandoned and then found god. He was now a reformed character.

I asked him what he’s done to put right all the things he’d done that had hurt people and his reply was…

“What do you mean? “Put things right.”"

I explained that since he’s abandoned his kids perhaps he should try and help them and their mothers. Maybe he could put part of his income into a charity that supported recovering addicts. That sort of thing.

His reply was that he didn’t need to do anything. His sins were forgiven and the slate had been wiped clean.

Then in came responses from all the other people in the room. They all agreed that once you’d been born again there was no need to do anything else. You don’t have to give back the money you stole, apologize to the families you ruined, hand yourself over to the law for the crimes you committed. You’d been forgiven and that was the end of the matter.

There you have it. The core immorality of Christianity.

These Christians had a vague dismissive approach to law. An un-American attitude that you should be free of any consequences of your actions once you’d said you were sorry for them.

Should this type of thinking actually come to dominate the processes of our country  we can just forget about the courts. Just swear on the Bible that you’re sorry and there’s nothing more to worry about. 

I’m on line at the movement watching the news conference at www.evangelicalmanifesto.com.

Although none of the major evanlgelical voices have signed the report there is at last an attempt by this Christian group to try and clean up it’s act.

Dr Oz Guiness gets it utterly right when he categorizes his own tribe’s reaction to today’s evangelical leadership…

“… I met a dozen evangelicals giving up on it. Two of them were eminent scholars one was a community activist and the rest were significant lay people. Some of them felt embarrassed, some of them felt ashamed and some of them felt revolted.”

Hear, hear!

Three or four times in my life I have had to face my own cruelty.

I never meant to harm someone. I just did it without realizing. I destroyed the faith of an individual leaving them with no support and then had to watch as they crumpled.

It’s so easy to do. You’re at a dinner party and, under the influence of a glass of wine, you allow yourself to state the atheist position clearly and with passion. Glancing up you see someone suddenly understand what you mean and the veil drops from their eyes.

Recently a young guy with two doctorates was expostulating about the necessity of religion and I said something like “No really intelligent person actually believes! They just pretend to because it makes them feel OK. You have to be brave to let go of belief.” and it happened. I watched as an avalanche of deception slide silently across the table and lie between us. 

Two weeks later he rang me and said that I had destroyed the foundation of his life. That he had spent days in agony. That he was glad it had happened.

My response was that it wasn’t me that did it. Not guilty! He was just ready to hear what I’d said and that if it not been my statement then he would have read it, heard it seen it somewhere else.

This readiness to understand seems to be one of the jumping off points that all people come to. For many the jump across the abyss is just too scary. They retreat from the edge and avoid any path that may approach it. Listen to committed Christians use Bible quotations, denial and personal attacks in order to avoid the semantic content of what is being said. If they were actually to hear and engage themselves with the meaning of the conversation… they get too near the edge and they know that staring down into it fills them with fear, that the jump across into clear thinking is a psychological impossibility. The gap is too wide, the fall too far to survive.

Here’s another scenario.

Two, why is it always two, Jehovah’s Witnesses come to the door. I invited them in. After a gentle half hour of conversation I say. “I don’t believe that and…” here I gave a significant pause and look, “… I know that you don’t believe that either!” and watched as one of them realized that their pretense, paper thin and oh so delicate, was ripping apart. In front of their companion.

After they’d gone I realized that in challenging belief, in instigating their crisis, I’d possibly torn apart a family, undermined the entire social scaffolding of a person. Left them with no means of managing the world.

That was cruel

It was “Gay Pride” here in Key West Florida. The floats were lined up in the car park behind the Post office. The tram company had put on a vehicle and was filled with the elderly and disabled. Our Mum has to choose, should she sit on a chair on top of the local church’s float or go with her Jewish friends on the tram? It’s the tram.

Behind it the local leather and levi club was swinging flags, up front the business guild was dressed as chickens - our local wild bird. It’s not a big parade, maybe twenty floats and cars. Most people want to watch and, as we exited the park onto Whitehead street the crowd roared. 

There are families with small children, Elderly Moms and Pops with beach-chairs (they’ve been there for more than an hour so as to be sure of a good place at the front.)

We’re throwing out beads and candy, leaving the condoms for the adult area of the march on Duval Street.

But wait, who’s this, way up the street, with the banners, screaming bible quotes at the parade. Why it’s Mr Phelps and family - or if not they’re cloned themselves.

The crowd acts rather strangely. The move in front of the protesters. More and more of them, after all they have got one of the best spots, and someone starts using a compressed air horn to drown them out. By the time we get there the people are five or six deep in front of them. I can hear annoyed people turning round and telling the banner carriers to stop shouting, go away.

They do! As we pass they regroup further back and walk off.

Near the end of the parade they turn up again, on another corner. Upstairs on a balcony a young woman is watching with her friends. She sees the Christians below her, hears their shouts, reads their banners and phones the police telling them that she is concerned that they may be in danger. Freedom of speech is all very well but this could lead to a civil disturbance. 

The protesters are moved on and away from the parade.

Earlier that week the largest and longest gay flag was unfurled along Duval street. There weren’t enough people to carry it and tourists, visitors, family shoppers came out on the streets and asked if they could help. The whole community, 2000 of us stood with a flag a mile and a quarter long dipped into the Gulf of mexico at one end and the Atlantic Ocean on the other.

And we all though, “This is how it should be!”

It’s Sunday and the great thing about religion is that, as all the Christians are in church, booking a table for brunch is so much easier!

I can remember, many tears ago “pretending” to be psychic. It was the easiest task in the world. I can still tell fortunes with a tarot pack that are so accurate that people who know I am an atheist and a poo-pooer of such things declare that I am proof that  psychic powers exist. “How do you it otherwise?”

It’s cold reading. Even I didn’t realize how I did it until it was explained to me - but I knew it was a trick.

Now the British government is about to repeal The Fraudulent Medium Act of 1951 replacing it with much tougher legislation.

There are only two ways round it for fraudulent, if well meaning, woo-woo workers (mediums, spiritualists, complimentary healers etc) who accept money. In their own words…

Thus the spiritual worker should choose their words carefully. It would seem that saying that it is a scientific experiment in which the outcome cannot be satisfactorily predicted is one way to stay within the legislation. Another is to class it as entertainment. The biggest problem of the regulations is the word ‘vulnerable’. It is extremely difficult to define vulnerability let alone work out whether someone who comes to you for a ‘spiritualistic’ (the government’s term – not ours) service is vulnerable. It could probably be argued that quite a few people who seek healing or mediums are vulnerable. In short, it would seem the changes in legislation are a minefield, not least because of the litigation culture that is now sweeping the UK.

The SWA found the presentation extremely useful and informative and felt the advice given was excellent. However, they also suggested that although these measures might be necessary in the short term, in the long term there should be another way.

Mediums and healers believe they are communicating with Spirit. We do not believe we are conducting a scientific experiment. To have to stand up and say so is a denial of our beliefs. It is also sending out a message to the public that we do not believe what we are saying and doing. ”

Good! They should have seen it coming!

I’m sorry. It’s very unbecoming of me but I do so love it when people like Bishop Michael Reid,  the head of Peniel Church and school in Essex, fall.

It’s an unpleasant trait that I have, I admit it.

But consider. He’s been badmouthing gay men and lesbians, selling insurance to his parishioners, and all sorts of other odnesses - see The Guardian Report of Sunday December 31 2000.

Now he’s had to resign. For adultery. 

This is an instance of “Natural Justice” - the universe working it’s way.

I give a little sigh of contentment! 

He who excuses himself, accuses himself.
  [Fr., Qui s’excuse, s’accuse.]
      - Tresor des Sentences GABRIEL MEURIER (MEURIR OR MURIER)

Flemish educationist, philologist and writer.(1530 - 1601)

Having predicted that Monique Davis would apologize to Rob Sherman  I’m about to claim the official title of “Atheist Psychic.”

But her half hearted “sorry” with excuses really isn’t enough. Qui s’excuse, s’accuse!

In anger, when drunk or under the influence of drugs we often say things that lie quietly at the centre of our view of the world. Things that we know are unacceptable but still lurk there.

I have them. My response to a badly executed maneuver on the freeway by a driver allows me to latch on to dreadful racist, sexist feelings that still live inside me - even though I try to expunge them. Still, the conscious effort to quell them makes me feel like I’m fighting the good fight. There’s no getting away from it though. I’m a racist sexist bastard… but a repenting one.

Think of Mel Gibson’s anti-semitic tirade, Julian Tavarez’s homophobic response to being booed and so on. It’s usually men, but no always.

What Monique Davis opens a window on her internal world. Despite all the experiences she has had with being silenced, dismissed and bullied out comes the same silencing, bullying and dismissal when she gets angry.

She apologized for saying it, not for thinking it. She excused herself, and others excused her,  because she said it was “triggered by learning shortly beforehand…that there’d been another Chicago Public School student killed.”

This is her excuse.

She said that “it was wrong for her to take out her anger, frustrations and emotions on me, and that she apologized…” but she still thinks that “You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.” 

Ms. Davis needs to make the right apology. Something like “No excuses! I shouldn’t have said that, I shouldn’t have thought it. I was wrong”