WARNING: The following is a short but factual biography of a real person and as such, all the events it relates actually happened; however, as with most true-crime stories, some readers may find them uncomfortably graphic. I’ve actually left some of the more disturbing details out, but even so…

Meet Carl Panzram, every man’s nightmare.

Born on June 28, 1891 on a desolate farm in northern Minnesota to hard-working, stern, dirt poor German-American parents, his father abandoning the family in 1898, Carl faced a bleak future working the unproductive family farm with his mother, brothers, and sister from dawn to dusk. His brothers beat him continuously for any reason no matter how insignificant, and when one of them discovered that Carl had burglarized a neighbor’s home at the age of 11, he beat the boy senseless before Carl got arrested for the robbery.

In 1903, Carl was sent to the Minnesota State Training School, a reform institution for juveniles in Red Wing, Minnesota, where he was brought into a reception office. A male staff member stripped him naked, examined him with humiliating closeness, and questioned him in detail about his sexual practices before sending him into the school population. It was a sign of very bad things to come, for the school ran with practically no watchdogging whatsoever, and the lack of oversight allowed for abuses to be committed in the name of “reforming” its helpless inmates that might shock us today – if we hadn’t heard these stories before.

The inmates also received Christian training and when they misbehaved or failed to learn the lessons properly, they were attacked by angry, vindictive attendants. Because Carl received little formal education when he lived on the farm, he was unable to read very well. For this he was also beaten regularly….Soon he developed a hatred for the attendants and everything connected to religion, which he saw as the cause of his suffering.

In late 1905, Carl was on his way out of the horrors of the Minnesota State Training School. He learned to say the things the staff wanted to hear and when he appeared before the parole board, he convinced them that he was a changed boy and had been “reformed” by the school. “I was reformed all right…I had been taught by Christians how to be a hypocrite and I had learned more about stealing, lying, hating, burning and killing,” he said, “I had learned that a boy’s penis could be used for something besides to urinate with and that a rectum could be used for other purposes…”

This torturous early experience, plus later equally brutalizing stints at other reform schools and prisons, including the notorious hell-hole Leavenworth, turned Carl into a hulking, intimidating, vicious monster of a man, bitter and unrepentant, living almost always on the run. The victim of repeated back-breaking labor, torture, and gang rapes, almost all caused if not outright enforced by the social systems in place at the time (early 1900s), he fought back the way he had been taught: beating, robbing, shooting, vandalizing, raping men and boys, and mass murdering them on a “mission of destruction that was unlike anything law enforcement had ever seen before.”

Besides raping males, he most loved to burn churches, courtesy of his early introduction to the Minnesota State Training School’s brand of Christianity. “Naturally, I now love Jesus very much, “ he said, “Yes, I love him so damn much that I would like to crucify him all over again!”

Once Carl was captured for the last time and sentenced to hang, a young, liberal-minded prison guard named Henry Lesser apparently befriended and gave him writing materials with which to record his memoirs. Carl wrote a 20,000-word confession/book, the source of his chilling quotes. In it, he boasted: “In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 100 male human beings. For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry.”

On the day of his execution in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in 1930, he ran happily up the gallows steps, spit in the executioner’s face and yelled: “Hurry up you bastard, I could kill ten men while you’re fooling around!”

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This kind of goes along with Sean’s previous post about no tax dollars for a National Day of Prayer. I ran across this while browsing around the Freedom From Religion Foundation website. I never knew that Ulysses S. Grant was anti-religion and totally supported the separation of church and state. I guess that is one of the things that was left out of history class when I was in school.

“Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the Church, and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.”
– Ulysses S, Grant, address delivered in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1875

On this date in 1822, Ulysses S. Grant, 18th president of the United States, was born in Ohio. The Union victory at the end of the Civil War was credited to Grant, who became General of the Army. Grant was U.S. president from 1869 to 1877. He was a favorite of irreverent author Mark Twain, who gave the keynote at a toast for Grant at the Palmer House in Chicago in 1879, as part of an illustrious line-up of speakers that included agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll. Twain was entrusted to publish Grant’s Memoirs. Grant was not a member of any church, and was never baptized. After receiving eight demerits as a cadet at West Point for failure to attend chapel, he protested in a letter that it was “not republican” to be forced to go to church (Brown’s Life of Grant, p. 329, cited by Franklin Steiner, The Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents). Grant was on record in favor of taxation of church property. In an annual address to Congress in 1875, he warned of “the importance of correcting an evil that if permitted to continue, will probably lead to great trouble in our land . . . It is the acquisition of vast amounts of untaxed Church property. . . I would suggest the taxation of all property equally.” D. 1885.

So it seems I can do no right this week. Maybe it has something to do with my lady being away. A man needs a woman around to keep his brain from turning to mush.

Anyway, in the interest of avoiding putting my foot in it again, I will keep this one short.

After barfing my way through Presidential Prayer for Kids, I found myself on the official website for the so-called National Day of Prayer (coming soon to a First Amendment violation near you!). From there I went poking around their map-based events calendar. Although there seem to be events planned all over the country, when I typed in my San Francisco zip code, it said: There were no results found in your area.

So I typed in my old zip code from Oakland. Same deal. Then I went to this site and chose every zip code from Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco — long described as the most progressive cities in America… and the only places in Northern California that I have ever, or will ever, live.

I didn’t find a single fucking event.

I love this town.

I wanted to post this video to update the post I wrote recently regarding the Westboro Baptist Church. You want to know how scary these people are? They make Fox News’ Hannity and Colmes look like the good guys.

I’ve heard religious whack jobs screaming from street corners that have nothing on her. Frighteningly enough, she makes one valid point: the law in Iowa is unconstitutional. As much as I hate Westboro Baptist Church and their message, they have the right to express it. Thankfully, the counter-protestors are there to express their message as well. Oh, and damn you people, you made me side with Sean Hannity. Now I need to take a shower and scrub off the evil.

I have a story for you …one of the guys my husband worked with at his last company is fundamentalist Catholic and had been “evangelizing” to us via mail us for EIGHT YEARS. (I never knew Catholics could be so evangelical!) He would send us packages and envelopes containing rosary beads, holy cards, Catholic magazine subscriptions…we jokingly called him “Father Finegan” (his last name is Finegan). We let it slide because we figured he is an older guy and my husband got a kick out of debating with the old fellow.

In the beginning of this friendship with my husband, he seemed harmless. Annoying, however, but most of our family and friends are believers, so when he invited us to meet him for lunch one day, I went along at my husband’s request, sort of reluctantly. Well, as we were eating our Chicago-style beef sandwich and fries, Finegan started telling us about the virgin Mary, then Jesus and that whole “he died for you” story…we told him we KNEW about all that and when he and my husband started debating about Gawd right there in the restaurant, I just wanted to leave.

We made it through the lunch, him promising to “pray” for us and we politely smiled and ignored the statement and said farewell. We never saw him in person again, but he decided to pursue our “salvation” via the postal service. We had sent little polite notes and cards back to him thanking him for thinking of us, but to please STOP sending us religious material. But he was relentless. Saving our souls had become his mission in life.

On a regular basis we were sent mailings of religious literature and paraphernalia. The rosaries kept coming, the sad and morbid looking holy cards, cards that said a mass was being held in our name, booklets on how to be saved, and it went on and on and on until finally, last year I had to put a stop to it. Our last delivery was a hard cover copy of a book about the making of Mel “Psycho” Gibson’s Passion of the Christ…along with a rosary, holy card…magazine…and a letter saying how we were going to burn in hell and lost forever if we didn’t accept Jesus as our savior and repent of our sins. I was furious! I threw the book in the dumpster. My husband, who hates to see books go to waste, said maybe we should have given it to our Baptist niece and I said NO…I didn’t want in any way to perpetuate that bullshit.

My husband would have gone on debating him forever, but since I was involved I determined that enough was enough. I sat down and wrote Mr. Finegan a long letter saying how I threw everything away that he sent, and I told him not to send ANYTHING RELIGIOUS to us ever again. I told him we have respected his religious views and tolerated his total LACK of respect for OUR non-beliefs long enough. That happened last year and we haven’t heard from him again.

Sometimes tolerance just doesn’t work.

originally published at Stardust Musings and Thoughts for the Freethinker in January 2006

OK, so I’ve been at YouTube.com.

I’m not a big Ali G fan, but this is a pretty funny bit of him goading some religious “leaders”. It’s worth it just for the priest’s face.
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Since we tend to be fans of both Julia (see the earlier post Julia Sweeney’s loss of faith) and Mike (see many posts here) around here, I thought I’d pass along the new press release from The Secular Coalition for America:

Atheist Activist Newdow and Humorist Sweeney Join Secular Lobby

Washington, DC — The Secular Coalition for America (www.secular.org) is
pleased to announce the addition of Michael Newdow and Julia Sweeney to
its advisory board. The Secular Coalition for America is a lobbying
organization representing the interests of atheists, humanists,
freethinkers, and other nontheists in the nation’s capitol. The Secular
Coalition made headlines last September when it hired Lori Lipman Brown, a
former Nevada State Senator, as the first full-time lobbyist for atheists
at the federal level.

Michael Newdow, a medical doctor and lawyer, is best-known for his Pledge
of Allegiance case, Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (2004).
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the phrase “under God” in
the pledge constituted an endorsement of religion, and therefore violated
the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court
refused to consider the case based on its merits and overruled this
decision based on procedural grounds. Newdow has since filed a similar
suit on behalf of three unnamed parents and their
children. On September 14, 2005, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton,
citing the precedent set by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in
Newdow’s previous suit, ruled that the pledge was unconstitutional. In
November 2005, Newdow filed a lawsuit to have “In God We Trust” removed
from U.S. coins and currency. Information on the progress of his lawsuits
can be found at www.restorethepledge.com.

The actor and comedian, Julia Sweeney is most well-known for her roles on
Saturday Night Live, particularly her androgynous character Pat. She was
also won critical acclaim for her one-woman shows God Said, Ha! and
Letting Go of God. In the latter play, Sweeney discusses her Irish
Catholic upbringing, early religious beliefs, and the life events and
internal search that led her to the realization that the universe works
fine without a God in charge of it. She is currently writing a book My
Beautiful Loss of Faith Story for Henry Holt & Co. This book further
explores her journey from religious faith to philosophical naturalism.
You can find more information on Julia Sweeney at her official website
www.juliasweeney.com.

Lori Lipman Brown, the Director of the Secular Coalition for America,
stated “I have long admired Dr. Newdow’s courage, integrity, and intellect
and Ms. Sweeney’s bravery, humor, and artistry. They have both publicly
presented themselves as atheists at a time when the religious right has
left many fearful to speak up. I am especially proud that Michael Newdow
and Julia Sweeney have agreed to join the advisory board of the Secular
Coalition for America to further our mission of increasing the visibility
and respectability of nontheistic viewpoints in the United States and in
protecting and strengthening the secular character of our government as
the best guarantee of freedom for all.”

For more information contact Lori Lipman Brown, Director, Secular
Coalition for America at 202-299-1091 or Lori@secular.org.

Update #2: Exbeliever from Debunking Christianity comes to tell us that our own Ron knows him in the real world. Exbeliever: please don’t go bury your head in the sand. Skeptics will be skeptics, and even assholes like the Tribble-Dogs sometimes stumble upon reality. Unless Ron comes on here and says he has no idea what the fuck you are talking about, please consider the re-titling of this post redemption (to use “their” terminology). The webernets are full of bullshit. Having a bullshit-meter constantly active is the sacred duty of any good skeptic. And Marcus: I never believed the Trial-Hogs, either. I just was — and still am — curious about some of the things I described in this post.

Update: Thanks to a little detective work and word from John Loftus over at Debunking Christianity, it is looking like this was probably just a nasty rumor created by the trustworthy folks over at Triablogue. Please see the comments on this entry, including Mr. Lofton’s response here.

Apropos of today’s regrettable domestic quarrels here at GifS over the validity of activities that could be seen as baiting, trolling or misrepresenting on the webernets, I came across this post on Triablogue that I have to admit gave me pause. We have linked to Debunking Christianity a number of times… And they originally put us in their blogroll.

Have we been had?

From the Tribble-dogs:

As any halfway observant individual can discern for himself, Debunking Christianity is a hoax

The Blogdom of God is abuzz with gossip and rumormongering over the true identity of the comic genius that did it.

At last count, the smart money was on Frank Walton.

The trick in hoaxing a weblog is to give it just enough initial consistency to hook the unsuspecting while planting enough discreet, but well-placed, clues to alert the attentive…

… As to Lippard, this is clearly a cut-and-paste concoction. Walton simply cooked up a fictitious profile, and stuffed the Lippard blog with Moveon.org hand-me-downs…

… Holman is another cut-and-paste job. All Wanton need to do was glean a few hortatory quotes from Ingersoll and string them together…

… But since some folks are slow on the uptake, Walton has favored us with another broad hint when Loftus highlighted the deconversion of “Dennis.”

If you click on the link, it takes you to a one-time member of notorious cult who’s currently working as a massage “therapist.”

Needless to say, no self-respecting atheist would cite such an all-around loser as a character witness for atheism…

But then check this out:

… One of Walton’s finest creations is Acharya S., a new-age quackster worthy to stand beside Miss Haversham.

Equally Dickensian in his mastery of eccentric characterization is “Stardust Musings.”

She’s no more real than Tinkerbell. Come to think of it — she is Tinkerbell.

Her literary pedigree goes back to Carl Sagan, when Mr. Walton bought a 50¢ copy of Cosmos (“Billions and billions”) down at the used bookstore, snugly sandwiched in-between Synchrodestiny and Out on a Limb…

Okay, wait. That’s our own Stardust, gang… She is neither a Tinkerbell, nor a fictitious character — nor is her love of Carl Sagan false.

But that doesn’t mean this Tribble-Frogs post isn’t onto something. The more I look at D.C., the more the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Something seems off when you look at it with new eyes. Am I falling for a Tribble-Hawgs trap? Or is something fishy going on over at D.C.? Go back to the site and read with an eye toward “scam.” What do you think?