Rockets hit Israel, which says truce broken

Tue Jun 24, 12:20 PM ET
JERUSALEM – Palestinian militants on Tuesday fired three homemade rockets into southern Israel, the first such attack since a cease-fire between Israel and Gaza militants took effect last week.

Israel condemned the attack as a “gross violation” of the truce, but did not say whether it would retaliate.

The barrage wounded two people and capped a day of violence that presented the truce with its first serious test.

I speculated it wouldn’t last through the summer, but it didn’t even last a month, not even a week.

Will Israel retaliate? Of course.

Here they go again, those fundies making excuses when the reality of what the Bible (particularly the OT) says is brought up. Bible believers will say “it’s not what the Bible means”, or “that was meant for the people at the time it was written and times have changed” (except for those things they still choose to cling to that suits their own purposes and supports their own bigotry against other human beings, selfish imagined heavenly rewards, afterlife delusion, etc.).

Obama makes nearly the same point we atheists have been making forever — Christians cherry-pick out of a book they most likely have never read.

James Dobson accuses Obama of `distorting’ Bible

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – As Barack Obama broadens his outreach to evangelical voters, one of the movement’s biggest names, James Dobson, accuses the likely Democratic presidential nominee of distorting the Bible and pushing a “fruitcake interpretation” of the Constitution.

The criticism, to be aired Tuesday on Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio program, comes shortly after an Obama aide suggested a meeting at the organization’s headquarters here, said Tom Minnery, senior vice president for government and public policy at Focus on the Family.

The conservative Christian group provided The Associated Press with an advance copy of the pre-taped radio segment, which runs 18 minutes and highlights excerpts of a speech Obama gave in June 2006 to the liberal Christian group Call to Renewal. Obama mentions Dobson in the speech.

“Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?” Obama said. “Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?” referring to the civil rights leader.

Dobson took aim at examples Obama cited in asking which Biblical passages should guide public policy — chapters like Leviticus, which Obama said suggests slavery is OK and eating shellfish is an abomination, or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application.”

“Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles,” Obama said.

Then typical responses we have heard all too often. Christians totally deny the book of Leviticus:

Dobson and Minnery accused Obama of wrongly equating Old Testament texts and dietary codes that no longer apply to Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament.

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said.

Umm, excuse me Mr. Dobson, but that is exactly what Christians do, picking and choosing and putting together a nice little interpretation for themselves according to what suits their own purposes. You’re theology, your Bible is what is confused and distorted, Mr Dobson! So much so that Christians cannot even agree amongst yourselves on what that “traditional understanding” is.

“… He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”

Which is exactly where your evil Bible belongs.

. . . as long as they involve some sort of afterlife delusion.

America remains a nation of believers, but a new survey finds most Americans don’t feel their religion is the only way to eternal life.

57 percent of evangelical church attenders said they believe many religions can lead to eternal life, in conflict with traditional evangelical teaching.

In all, 70 percent of Americans with a religious affiliation shared that view, and 68 percent said there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their own religion.

“The survey shows religion in America is, indeed, 3,000 miles wide and only three inches deep,” said D. Michael Lindsay, a Rice University sociologist of religion.

“There’s a growing pluralistic impulse toward tolerance and that is having theological consequences,” he said.

Illustrates my point that they make their religion to whatever they want it to be.

The report argues that while relatively few people — 14 percent — cite religious beliefs as the main influence on their political thinking, religion still plays a powerful indirect role.

Which, in a country of mostly Xians makes this following report a bit worrisome:

Americans believe in miracles, heaven, power of prayer: report

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Around three-quarters of Americans believe in miracles, more Americans believe in heaven than in hell, and nearly six in 10 pray every day, a report based on a survey of 35,000 US adults showed Monday.

Of those who pray regularly, around a third — 31 percent — say God answers their prayers at least once a month, and one in five Americans said they receive direct answers to prayer requests at least once a week, the report by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said.

Seventy-four percent of those surveyed for the report, called the US Religious Landscape Survey, said they believed in heaven as a place where people who have led good lives are rewarded, while only around six in 10 believed in hell, where unrepentant evil-doers languish in eternal punishment.

*snip*

Nearly eight in 10 American adults (79 percent) believe that miracles occur, the survey, conducted between May and August last year, showed.

But perhaps most striking in the report was the near unanimous belief in God, held by more than nine out of 10 Americans.

*snip*

“Six in 10 adults believe God is a person with whom people can have a relationship, but one in four, including about half of Jews and Hindus, see God as an impersonal force,” he said.

And this part below puzzles me. Who the fuck were they interviewing? From the answers, it couldn’t be any atheists I know. Could be that the ones doing the survey believe what they want to believe, they hear what they want to hear.

Oddly, one in five of those who identified themselves as atheists in the survey said they believe in God.

“It may very well be that they don’t really know what atheist means. It sounds good so they answered it; we call that measurement error,” Greene said.

“But this also shows us the complicated way that people think about their faith. Many people who identify as atheists may not be telling us they don’t believe in God, but that they don’t like organized religion,” he said.

“In addition to having atheists who say they believe in God, we have people who say they are very committed to a religious tradition but don’t believe in God,” he added.

Someone should inform these dumbasses that atheist means NO BELIEF IN THE EXISTENCE OF ANY GOD OR GODS. None, nada.

We all have to go sometime, but when one of us does it’s very sad to say goodbye. George Carlin was one of my favorite comedians.

George Carlin dies at 71

LOS ANGELES – George Carlin, the frenzied performer whose routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television” led to a key Supreme Court ruling on obscenity, has died.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. He was 71.

“He was a genius and I will miss him dearly,” Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.

My favorite Carlin bit:

“The longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize something is fucked up.” George Carlin

This is almost comical. 2008 and superstition still prevails.

“Curse of the Fuwa” fulfilled by floods

BEIJING (Reuters) – Floods sweeping southern China seem to have fulfilled the final stanza of an Internet curse involving Beijing’s Olympic mascots, but censors have been quick to remove postings that might fuel the superstition.

After a devastating earthquake struck Sichuan province last month, Internet users tied four of the five “Fuwa” mascots to the calamities that have struck China in the run-up to the Games, which begin in August. One Fuwa is a panda, the totem of Sichuan.

The others resemble a torch, reminding netizens of the protests against the international Olympic torch rally; a Tibetan antelope tied to widespead demonstrations in Tibetan areas; and a swallow that looks like a kite, linked to a deadly train crash in Shandong province.

The final Fuwa, sporting a fish, was left unexplained in the original superstition as a curse yet to come.

Unexplained, that is, until widespread flooding in southern and central China claimed dozens of lives in June.

“I am in Shenzhen. There is heavy rain for two days and no sign that it will stop… now the curse of the last “fish” has proven correct. What shall we do?” said a post by yellow_hades on Tianya, a popular online forum.

That and similar posts have disappeared quickly this week. China’s censors monitor the Internet carefully and remove any posts deemed inflammatory or not in line with government policy.

Major calamities, earthquakes in particular, were viewed in imperial China as a sign that a dynasty had lost the mandate of Heaven.

Although the Communist Party has tried to stamp out “feudal superstition” since it took power in 1949, the Beijing Games will start on the auspicious moment of 8:08 pm, on August 8 2008. Eight is a lucky number in Chinese.

Your unflappable conceptions
Moralistic views
Never open to criticism
Your overpowering ruse
Promises of sanctuary
In eternal bliss
With starry eyes and cash in hand
Pledge all to the master plan
Just face the truth or fund the farce
At one with your god
Your sole intent
Your treasured place assured
For a substantial rent
Global lunacy
Death threats for supposed blasphemy
No room for free thought
All non believers pushed to the floor
Aggressive tyrants
Supposed saints for the cause
Judgement through force
Faith a fuel for pointless wars
When all is done
Who shall benefit? who is the one?
Not to those who pass on
But those dictators divine waving their deceitful wands.
Napalm Death, Suffer The Children

It was Stardust’s recent post that prompted this: while the three Abrahamanic religions forbid infanticide, there are far-reaching ramifications of this morbid meme we call religion.

‘Religious freedom’ allowed these particular fucktards to let their children die. As well as these morons.

And then we have so many superlative examples to draw upon: the case of the crazy ass fairy beggar grandpa and the naked, blood-draped mother exorcising a 2 year old who had ‘demons’ in her.

Arvin Shreeve, who had patriarchal control issues that extended to ‘educating’ female children in ways both dietary and carnal.

There are these mental midgets, who ‘used a Ouija board’, and somehow, ‘demons’ caused the child to burn their house down.

Then there’s this bit of terror from London, where children are being abused in exorcism rituals in African churches.

(And the Christian religion is not the only culprit: Islam has a great deal to answer for, as well.)

We also have such princes among men like Ervil LeBaron, Jim Jones, Joseph Kibwetere, Marcus D. Wesson,  a lineage of religious madness that dates back to Gilles de Rais and Countess Bathory.

The track record is clear, the patterns obvious: superstition is a reversed Occam’s Razor, that slices psyches as it multiplies needless supernatural entities. It cloaks the mentally ill from treatment: it not only vindicates night terrors, it gives them shapes and names, rather than banishing them to the imagined shadows from whence they came.

And in the long run, seeing as the religious are as fertile as rabbits, it is the child who suffers from medieval terrors and bronze-age boogeymen, those shadows of the night that never laid foot (nor ever will) on this earth.

So, if you are religious, and you are reading this, put aside your outrage for a moment, look in a mirror, and ask yourself: Is your fantasy a substantial substitute for reality? If so, can you really truly ‘believe’ that these fantasies provide a safe, viable alternative to doing actual parenting, that any Bronze Age tome of dubious anachronistic epistemology has any value at all in the 21st century?

In short, religion is a dead metaphor, best consigned to the scrapbooks of history, an albatross to be shed, as auguries and omens are patchwork memes from days past.

It is no longer ‘Suffer the children’, but that the children are suffering, and for the most part of that is religion.

Till the next post then.

Many of you probably know this tool. VenomfangX has to be one of the biggest dumbasses on YouTube.

“I get laughed at” VenomfangX

Ah, the clusterfuck that is my government…

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the “new and improved” FISA bill just passed the House, and it’s heading to the Senate.

Get on the horn to your Senators and tell them to stop this thing:

The provision granting amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, Title VIII, has the exact Orwellian title it should have: “Protection of Persons Assisting the Government.” Section 802(a) provides:

[A] civil action may not lie or be maintained in a Federal or State court against any person for providing assistance to an element of the intelligence community, and shall be properly dismissed, if the Attorney General certifies to the district court of the United States in which such action is pending that . . . (4) the assistance alleged to have been provided . . . was –

(A) in connection with intelligence activity involving communications that was (i) authorized by the President during the period beginning on September 11, 2001, and ending on January 17, 2007 and (ii) designed to prevent or detect a terrorist attack, or activities in preparation of a terrorist attack, against the United States” and

(B) the subject of a written request or directive . . . indicating that the activity was (i) authorized by the President; and (ii) determined to be lawful.

So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words — the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists — and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was.

Jonathan Turley on KO said some very straightforward things about the bill and also about its context:

Turley: I think they’re simply waiting to see if the public’s interest will wane. [...] Even when they [Dems] were campaigning for civil liberties, they were aware of an unlawful surveillance program as well as a torture program. And ever since that came out, the Democrats have been silently trying to kill any effort to hold anyone accountable, because that list could very well include some of their own members. [...]

KO: So this is not F-I-S-A, this is C-Y-A.

I shudder to think that Chomsky was right, and that both parties are actually in favor of this bill.

But, then again, FUCK THEM. Why should we make THEIR fuck-ups OUR problems?