Christ gets Upstaged

Happy Pride 2009!

Obama Accomplishes Nothing

My thoughts exactly almost exactly.

Christian Traditions

My father died in 2007 and my brother has started going through some of the seemingly endless boxes that my father had had in storage.  Aside from showing me that he was not the straight A student he claimed to be, this report card from Valpo University sheds some light on other, darker subjects.  Perhaps the reason why I’m an atheist today is because my father evidently got a D in “Christian Traditions 3″.  Bravo old man, bravo.  This is the same man who signed off on my pledges to be a good christian in my cub scout book.

Despite this report card, I still love ya papa.

Chief Justice Roberts – Model Conservative

From the New Yorker:

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.  Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

This is a very interesting and frightening article by Jeffrey Toobin, exploring John Roberts’ career so far as Chief Justice.  It’s a thoughtful article about Roberts and well worth the read.

Pay-Day: Blackmail the Catholic Church

The New York Timeshas an interesting article about former Archbishop Weakland of Milwaukee.  Evidently 20 years ago he had had an affair with a 30 year old man who then blackmailed the Catholic church for $450,000 – what they paid to keep him quiet.

He has a memoir coming out next month which promises to be a good insight into the corruption of the Church.

The archbishop is also one of the first to actually come out of the closet.  He believes that the church’s teachings about women and homosexuals are misguided.  I hope he succeeds in his efforts to reform the church – for if there has to be a church, I’d rather it be a tolerant one.

National Day of Prayer

Today is the National Day of Prayer- that glorious day where all pretenses of state keeping separate from religion are destroyed and we can all get together and do something we would all be doing anyway.

Unless of course you are non-religious – in which case this day is actually kind of offensive in the civil liberties violating kind of way.

Obama in a way is sweeping the day under the rug, but he is signing a proclamation.

I hope you will join me in celebrating this day by not praying.

 

Camping with Jesus

So I’ll admit it – in 1990 I was a cub scout.  I recently stumbled upon my old ‘Wolf’ book and found something that I have no recolection of – the section about a cub scout’s duty to god:

Here is the Boy Scout of America website that details how and why they don’t let atheists be boyscouts.

More scans after the jump . . .

21st Century Crusades

American soldiers are distributing copies of the New Testament that they had printed in the native Afghan languages to the people of the country.  This is a direct violation of the US Constitution, Army rules, and the laws applying to troops in Afghanistan. 

And this footage was shot a year ago . . . so why hasn’t anything been done about it?  Sometimes it is easier and less controversial to just ignore a problem – that doesn’t mean that we should though.

Golden Rule Evidently Taken more as a Suggestion

From CNN:

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.  More than half of the people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified.  Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it.  People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it.  Only four in 10 of them did.

Perhaps it is because one of the most common things found at a religious service is:

But then again, I don’t really buy the argument that images of violence beget violence – so maybe it is just their fucked up morals.

Comcast – Get with the Program

Here’s another item to add to my already long list of things I hate about Comcast:

Why can’t they limit the list of channels in their channel guide to only the channels they’ll let me watch?  I don’t pay for HBO or any of it’s 87 spin off channels, so why do I have to scroll through them on the channel guide?  I have a feeling it is because they hope that I will see that The Princess Diaries is playing on HBO and that if I were only to order those channels I too could be enjoying it.  In reality it just makes me that much more bitter at Comcast every time I see the “for ordering info, please press “info”" message appear on my screen.

I understand, it is easier to just give everyone the same list of channels and let them remember which of the zillions of channels they are allowed to watch – but that hardly seems like good customer service.  In fact, I used Comcast’s online chat feature to ask if there was a way to limit the list of channels to only those I pay for, and after having to convince the customer service representative that I was not in fact having an issue with my remote (that’s always their first question, probably because their remote is the worst designed piece of shit on the planet) they eventually suggested that I try turning off the closed captioning . . .

It’s 2009 people.  It’s a digital service which means that somewhere there is a computer controlling what I see.  I know there is also a computer that knows exactly what I pay for.  Just link that shit up man!

And don’t get me started about the design/functionality of their DVR.  Sweet Jesus.

Don Giovanni – The Right Way

I stumbled upon this video of the final scene from Mozart’s brilliant opera, Don Giovanni.

What I like about this is the gratuitous use of women in bikinis.  That’s what I call opera!

Republican Teabagging Threesomes

From what I hear the Tea-bagging parties held this past April 15th were somewhat of a let-down.  Which is surprising because while I have never been to or seen a tea-bagging orgy party, I can’t imagine how they would fail to be at least more popular than they reportedly were. 

Jon Stewart’s take on teabagging.

Ok, so whomever decided that encouraging people to teabag Obama was a perfectly benign slogan – well, it may be compared to the conservatives next great campaign – 2m4m.

Oh god, the homo storm got me!

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/224789/april-16-2009/the-colbert-coalition-s-anti-gay-marriage-ad

Colbert’s parody of the Gathering Storm anti-gay marriage commercial.  Priceless

Limbaugh Doesn’t Know ANYONE who has died from torture.

A republican calls into Rush Limbaugh’s show and calls Limbaugh a brain-washed nazi.  True story – take a listen:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/07/republican-caller-tells-l_n_184244.html

But what I find most amusing is Limbaugh’s comment:

LIMBAUGH: I don’t know of anybody who died from torture.

Is that his defense of torture?  That makes no sense on so many levels.  I don’t listen to his show ridiculousness so I don’t know if this is an argument he has made in the past . . . but sweet jesus.  Now I remember why I don’t listen to his show.

Quote of the Day – Jacques Rivière

Romanticism aside, there is no other end to pure thought than death.

- Jacques Rivière