News blurb on Pastor Mondo article
12 September 2008 by StardustWell, lo and behold the New Lenox Patriot published my husband’s rebuttal to Pastor Mondo Gonzales in its entirety. I cannot believe it. It gives me hope that a newspaper printed this without editing it at all, including my husband’s ending criticism of the newspaper itself. (My husband did edit out a couple of things at the end at the suggestion of some of our readers, like calling the Bible a comic book. Readers would have zeroed in on that while overlooking the message of the rebuttal if he had left that in there.)
12 September 2008, on 5:54 pm
Kudos to your hubby, Star! Maybe the newspaper’s editors are closet atheists, and secretly think it’s about time for reactions like his to be aired as publicly as the godbotherers’…
12 September 2008, on 6:14 pm
Eve, I suspect that maybe they are because our other newspaper The Herald News of Joliet would chop up our letters to make us seem like total idiots. The Herald, I know, is full of god botherers, but this Patriot paper is a fairly new newspaper that started here a couple years ago. There is another asinine article published this week by another local fundie pastor who writes that what we all need is like Palin says “a change of heart” because “sin comes from the heart”. Hubby has already started his rebuttal to that one telling the moron that a heart is a MUSCLE to pump blood through the body and while the ancient folks believed all feelings and emotions came from the heart, in modern times we know it is just the main pump of the body. It’s our brain that makes us do things and what makes some go against rules of society are anti-social ones caused by various psychological conditions or triggers. The little “sins” though usually are no sins at all and only things we are taught to believe to be wrong and to feel unnecessarily guilty about like homosexuality, premarital sex, masturbation, etc. When folks are taught that these little things are something to feel terrible about, and made to feel bad and guilty about it, bigger real “sins” like rape and murder might happen because of psychological disturbances and years and years of guilt and feeling like a bad person with no control over one’s life. God botherers are so stupid about human psychology.
12 September 2008, on 7:06 pm
I’ve always laughed at the thought of masturbation as a sin, since masturbation serves as a way to decrease the risk of prostate cancer in men.
I guess NOT wanting to get cancer is a sin, huh?
Well then allow me to say that I am guilty of reducing my chances of prostate cancer FIVE times since I started this reply… oops, make that six.
Just kidding of course.
12 September 2008, on 9:34 pm
After 8 years of “going with our guts” I’d argue that thinking with the vicera or any other organs located in the thorax or abdomen (including our cardiovascular organs) may not be our best option.
With all due respect to Mary Kay Pitbull (and by that I mean of course a pittance) it’s time we make a real change and start using our brains, for fuck’s sake.
Of course, we all know that this is a very thinly veiled call for a return to Jebus–something this Alaskan chippy will repeat loud and often, without the pretense, if she and McPTSD are elected by the brain dead sector of our populace.
Stardust–way to go to your hubby. It’s about time our voice starts getting recognized in major media publications as well.
Food for thought–given what I’ve seen and heard of McCain, I would argue that if he is elected, we will see our first (unprincipled and shameless) atheist in office–discuss.
12 September 2008, on 10:09 pm
fritzy, maybe my husband will become a community celebrity if they keep printing his rebuttals. Reading through the comments on the newspaper’s websites, we are not alone in our opinions.
13 September 2008, on 12:32 am
Star;
It’d be pretty awesome if they eventually invited your husband to write semi-regular features in the paper–kinda like pastor Mondo’s articles, only not asinine.
13 September 2008, on 10:01 am
fritzy, wouldn’t that be great? Absolutely awesome! It’s about time people started enlightening these idiots. The pastor of the church we used to attend also has a turn writing something, but he is hard to pick on because he talks about a fluffy, feel-good nicey-nice god belief and I have often wondered if he even really believes the stuff he says he does or if it is just a job for him since he didn’t have it in him to be a farmer in Minnesota like his father. Most people hold pastors as some kind of superior when in fact most of them are not that intelligent, at all. And to see this lack of intelligence demonstrated, just start asking them some simple questions concerning the inconsistencies and absurdities in the Bible they believe in. Nearly all of them will get frustrated and simply walk away.
Though my husband sent a copy of the rebuttal to Mondo, he has not received a response from him. I am sure he used my husband’s letter in some way in a Sunday morning service as an illustration of how the devil tries to steal their Jesus away from them.
13 September 2008, on 2:24 pm
Star, I think it’s a real possibility that new paper might at least have more secular-minded people at its helm. When I was studying journalism way back in the mid-’80s, most of us still thought of it as a sort of duty to the people, a way to tell everyone what was really going on, to keep them as well-informed as possible so that their decisions could be that much more considered. We knew where the money was made (media ownership and to a lesser degree, syndicated TV anchoring), but it wasn’t that important to us. The image of the gutsy reporter brave enough to dig for the truth no matter how painful, and the gruff but honest editor willing to go to the wall to make sure his exposes were disseminated, were very powerful in our studies.
Then I went to grad school, started researching US media ownership, and hit a wall. Journalism was changing – and not for the better. Multinational corporations were already beginning to buy up the news industry and drastically reducing reporting to mostly fluff, as evidenced by the start of the entertainment show proliferation. Anchors were becoming more and more looks-driven celebrities; TV news stories were coalescing into slick, graphic-heavy “packages;” and investigative reporting was getting whittled down to superficial bits that aired once and didn’t follow up on their stories. Independent newspapers and radio stations were either closing down or being bought by ever larger conglomerations, some with overt political and economic agendas that included “more feel-good news to more people.”
My personal goals had revolved around editing rather than reporting; these changes would mean more kow-towing to corporate interests, often at the expense of real news and stories, if I stayed on this track. I figured it was more ethical to abandon this pretense news had become, and just be honest and go into straight out marketing and public relations. At least PR is open about being PR.
Newspapers have always represented a way for the average citizen to get in-depth information and education on a variety of issues, which the minute-newsbite TV package can’t give; how I would love to see a resurgence! Maybe Internet news reporting is also impacting the newspaper field as well.
So Star, I see a regular column in your husband’s future: “The Angry Atheist! Reason and Rationality with a Passion.”
13 September 2008, on 4:59 pm
Got a linky to the newspaper’s comment thread?
13 September 2008, on 8:24 pm
RBH, here is the link to the Mondo article and comments are at the bottom. Not too many, but not one in support of Mondo. (They probably don’t know what to say.) They printed my husbands rebuttal in the newspaper that comes to our house, but haven’t found it in the online edition yet.
Mondo comment thread link
13 September 2008, on 11:53 pm
Wow…some nice comments, me thinks!
I’m sure we GifSters could sprinkle some additional spice into the mix…NO?
Too bad…so far, at least…they didn’t have your husband’s rebuttal online.
14 September 2008, on 12:23 am
Chuck, if they post it online I will let everyone know.
14 September 2008, on 12:33 am
Star:
“Though my husband sent a copy of the rebuttal to Mondo, he has not received a response from him. I am sure he used my husband’s letter in some way in a Sunday morning service as an illustration of how the devil tries to steal their Jesus away from them.”
I doubt your husband will recieve a reply. Even the most evangelical fundie realizes that atheists such as your husband (the type that go out of their way to demand reason of the faithful) cannot be “unreasoned with.”
Of course they term someone such as your husband as “lost” or a “back-slider” who is not willing to “open up their hearts,” or some such non-sense. Putting asside the fact that most atheist counted themselves among the believers at some earlier point in their lives, I have yet to have anyone explain to me the value of “opening your heart” to anything if it requires closing your mind in the process.
And yes, I imagine your husband will be made an example of in Mondo’s sermon–perhaps some vague diatribe bemoaning the steady rise in angry atheists and the decline in “morality” in our world, signalling the immanent return of their long-lost invisible friend (about 2000 years behind his promised ETA by my watch–but of course the son of gawd could never be troubled to be anything but fashionably late.) Your husband will recieve many unsolicited and clandestine prayers.
When it comes down to it, the faithful mostly like preaching to the choir–unless they think they can convince someone by quoting their mythical tome, they quickly lose interest in dialogue on the matters and minutiae of their faith, especially with those who employ skeptical reasoning in their world view.
15 September 2008, on 9:45 pm
Posted a response to Mondo’s article on that website you linked to above:
Jesus wouldn’t vote for a candidate in favor of gay marriage?
September 14, 2008 | 11:49 AM
As opposed to a candidate who is an admitted, shameless serial adulterer? Have you read your bible, really? Your god had no more love for those who committed adultery than he did for homosexuals.
The ironic thing is that, from all indications, McCain (lets shed pretense–that’s who you’re really telling “True Christians” to vote for) is, for all intense purposes, an atheist.
But why am I attempting to reason with a man that bases his Presidential choices based largely on the candidates presumed congruence with some cherry-picked tenets of the barbaric, chauvanistic, bronze-age mythology of a small middle-eastern nomadic tribe?
Chris Fritzen
16 September 2008, on 11:00 am
Fritzy, great reponse!
And Mondo has paid us a visit here at the last post about him…he invited my hubby to a steak fry
He has no idea what he is asking. The are not ready to answer anything my husband asks…and is quite firm in demanding answers and keeping track of what people say.
Rebuttal to Pastor Mondo
31 October 2008, on 7:33 pm
Hey you guys are worried about your hubby’s article not being published b/c of what it says.. and yet, i don’t see my comment posted here. Is it b/c I am not preaching hate.. or fueling the hate for the Pastor..
All first time posters have to wait in the moderation queue. I have let through your first two comments, but am debating on the 3rd, as it violates the rules of commenting by getting preachy. Since you got preachy, all your comments will be moderated before being posted. Really, it’s so easy to take a moment to read the commenting policy link. -moderator