Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe. – Einstein

We are all vested in Schadenfreude, to some degree. It’s all right to admit it. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. Being an atheist, I somewhat wallow in it when it comes to mocking religulous wackadoolery – most of us at GiFS! are fairly invested in it.

In fact, it’s become a hallmark of American culture. We watch shows like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia (which I refer to as the Evil Seinfeld), we laugh at the Dilbert comic strips (like the one festooning this post), we find humor in the oddest places, sometimes in the cruelest. Pointing and jeering, and of course, that secret sigh of relief, thank the FSM that it was someone else, not I.

In my 51 years of life on this earth, I’m surprised that I still am shocked by the consistent stupidity of my fellow men (and women, so hush).

I can’t seem to shake this schadenfreude, this delight I take in the (abstract) suffering of others. Likelihood is good that my response would be far, far different were I watching the event take place, rather than reading about it. And of course, the old adage of ‘twenty-twenty hindsight being the best sight’ springs to mind. While we’d all like to think we’d spring into action if another human was imperiled, I’d likely be the fellow saying “Excuse me? I…don’t think you should do that…” Boom! Flash! Smell of cordite. Shrug. “I tried to tell him.”

In the spirit of this (almost) light-hearted introspection, the Darwin Awards are the epitome (but hopefully not the epitaph) of our species’…harrumph!…lack of critical thinking skills.

Let’s start off with some all time classics. 1996’s Macho Men:

Some men will got to extraordinary lengths to prove how macho they are. Frenchman Pierre Pumpille recently shunted a stationary car two feet by headbutting it. "Women thought I was a god," he explained from his hospital bed.

Deity or not, however, Pumpille is a veritable girl’s blouse compared to Polish farmer Krystof Azninski, who staked a strong claim to being Europe’s most macho man by cutting off his own head in 1995. Azninski, 30, had been drinking with friends when it was suggested they strip naked and play some "men’s games". Initially they hit each other over the head with frozen turnips, but then one man upped the ante by seizing a chainsaw and cutting off the end of his foot. Not to be outdone, Azninski grabbed the saw and, shouting "Watch this then," he swung at his own head and chopped it off.  "It’s funny," said one companion, "when he was young he put on his sister’s underwear. But he died like a man."

A 1998 classic:

(February 1998) Matthew and his friends were sliding down a Mammoth Mountain ski run on a foam pad at 3am, when he crashed into a lift tower and died. His makeshift sledge of yellow foam had been stolen from the legs of a lift tower on Stump Alley. The cushion is meant to protect skiers who hit the tower, and the tower Matthew ran into was the one from which he had created his sledge. There’s a moral in there somewhere.

And, an…eating disorder?

(1998, NJ) An unidentified 29 year old male choked to death on a sequined pastie he had orally removed from an exotic dancer at a Phillipsburg establishment. "I didn’t think he was going to eat it," the dancer identified only as "Ginger" said, adding "He was really drunk."

Why anyone would think that sort of feat would impress a girl…?

And, impatience is often rewarded with pain:

In Wesley Chapel, Florida, Joseph Aaron, 20, was hit in the leg with pieces of the bullet he fired at the exhaust pipe of his car. When repairing the car, he needed to bore a hole in the pipe. When he couldn’t find a drill, he tried to shoot a hole in it.

Can you say Duh-HOY, Aaron?

Really, seriously, what is wrong with these people? Funny as hell in the short run, but scary in the long term.

Share your favorite stories, Darwinian or anecdotal, let’s have a chuckle or two, while we stroke our collective chins in worry.

Till the next post, then.

This story, brought to my attention by my friend Andrea, is by far one of the most horrible stories I have heard in awhile.

Five Hours of Trying to Rape a Lesbian Straight

Millicent Gaika’s story is heart-breaking. As is Eudy Simelane’s, Anelisa Mfo’s and the countless others who have been swept up in South Africa’s culture of rape. The crimes committed against them are horrible. Let’s make sure that their pain and suffering didn’t happen in vain.

And check out the video in the story link above for even more information on the phenomenon of corrective rape.

Here is another video I found on YouTube.

While attitudes towards homosexuality in the U.S. stem from Christian beliefs and teachings, machoism is the cause of the attitudes against homosexuality in South Africa, which causes violent attacks most often against lesbians.

INTERVIEW-SAfrica rapes linked to macho culture-study author

“Fundamentally, rape is a problem that stems from ideas of manhood in South Africa,” said Jewkes.

“The position of men is superior to women in a patriarchal society and legitimates men’s behaviours towards women, predicated on ideas of sexual entitlement and behaviours that demonstrate men being in control over women.”

South African President Jacob Zuma has promised to end abuses against women. A polygamist who has angered women’s rights groups, Zuma was acquitted in a rape trial in 2006, when he justified having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman by saying he had taken a shower afterwards.

The study, of men in all racial groups and from different socio-economic backgrounds, showed half of those interviewed were under 25 years of age and 70 percent were under 30.

Nearly 10 percent said they had raped a woman or girl for the first time when they were under 10 years old. The HIV prevalence among those who raped was 19.6 percent.

Appalling.

Address South Africa’s Culture of Rape
Please sign the petition today.

The whole world is watching South Africa. Will it be a country that is viewed as a success story, and a country that values human rights? Or will it be a country that proudly boasts the reputation of the rape capital of the world?

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’ –Through The Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll.

I may have mentioned this before, but I’ll bring it up again:

I am both pro-life and pro-choice. Not necessarily in that order.

I admit freely and without qualms, that I am a speciesist. In that vein alone, I am bigoted. I am a bigot towards my own species. It is not that I consider lesser species to be our slaves, toys, or any other ridiculous thing. I simply value human beings above other animals. As such, I do lend value to human embryos, zygotes, blastocysts, or other variations of how a child comes to be.

Hold it right there.

This isn’t meant to be an insinuation, an inference, an implication, that any of these stages have attained the value of personhood, especially contrasted with person of the mother. The woman gets a choice. Simple enough?

My point here, is that through all these years of blogging, I’ve seen numerous EPIC FAIL arguments because of the intense polarization of the dispute. And as polarizing arguments go, both sides go too far. Ours as well as theirs. I’ll cite a few:

A. The growing child in the womb is a parasite.
This fails spectacularly, because actually, parasites don’t detach from the host, grow up, and end up taking care of the host in the host’s golden years.
B. Anybody who is pro-life is a practitioner of ‘sperm magic’
Again, fails. Sperm is only one component, so this is the logical fallacy of composition, not to mention a strawman. I find this particularly obnoxious, so do avoid this stupidity.
C. Accusations of ‘ensoulment’. I don’t need supernatural tendencies to value a child, or the beginnings of a child.

I’m sure numerous others will be brought up, and I’ll deal with those on a case-by-case basis. Here’s the point that grinds my gears:

It’s not a ‘in for a penny in for a pound’ situation. To clarify, the two sides of the issue go to ridiculous extremes. The pro-lifers holler that an embryo has full personhood value, the pro-choicers holler that it has zero. (This is also the fallacy of the false dichotomy.) As it is in real life, the actual answer lies somewhere in-between. As does my point. It’s natural, a part of the human condition, that we go to extremes. You, me, everybody, in some order, in some way, we all go overboard. And on polarizing issues, well, the extreme is almost cliché.

I can pretty much get an all around agreement that the majority of readers here love children. Why do we? Because of all the near-magical possibilities, the potentialities that can reach into the future. Most cultures are based on potentialities anyways, that foresight, looking to the future. And there are fewer more powerful symbols of that than children.

And while being pro-choice as well, I can haul out an extreme (but extremely possible) example: if say a woman who was two days away from giving birth went nutso, and decided that she was carrying the Antichrist, and wanted it cut out of her, there’s no way I could stand by and mumble that I was ‘pro-choice’, because obviously this lady’s brain has landed somewhere south of Pluto and obviously she isn’t fit to make a decision of that import.

And let’s face it: abortion is a no-win situation. Nobody’s in favor of it ‘just because’ – there’s long-term ramifications that have to be examined on a case-to-case basis. Tubular pregnancies, incestual rape (or any rape for that matter), drug addiction – it’s a necessary evil. Not a cause for celebration for anyone. The biggest concern is poverty – because being poor means a lack of education, lack of security, lack of everything that would be optimal for a child’s upbringing. Concerns such as birth control, religious folderol, and varied other variables put forth by the far right in their efforts to control the common woman.

So a wee bit o’ advice: the next time you (figuratively) inhale to bellow at some nimbulb who’s blattering on about abortion, take a bit of a breath, and think first. It’s natural to take the other side of the argument and go to extremes (I’ve done it too, guilty!) – but we promote ourselves as the rational ones, and it behooves us to walk the talk as such.

And that, dear readers, is my nickel’s worth. Spend it freely, or sock it away for a rainy day.

Till the next post, then.

LOL. An update to the post “Slutty Women Rockin the world

“

It seems like this just begs for us to promote something this nice and wholesome. Boobquake is slated to sart on Monday April 26. I personally hope it becomes a tradition.

Here’s the background: A Purdue University student is asking women around the world Monday to show a little cleavage, or some short shorts, as a humorous test to disprove an Iranian cleric’s theory that immodest dress has the power to make the Earth shake.

The article is here as well as other headlines and articles from around the world.

So be careful on monday everyone. Those immodest women are going to be out tempting us all and trying to shake the earth.

PSA over.

So often are we embroiled in contextual as well as metaphorical battle with the minions of religious darkness, that we sometimes neglect to notice that the world is advancing. True enough, it is halting, it is sporadic, but the days of torches and pitchforks at the door seems to become more a thing of the past, and those of us that aren’t supernaturally dysfunctional needn’t develop cricks in our necks by glancing over our shoulders constantly. 

I stumbled upon this little gem recently, and found it cool.

This is a panel from a graphic novel from Marvel, a part of the Dark Reign story arc. More specifically, the gentleman in white is one Fantomex, and the other fellow (without the mask) is Noh-Varr. The synopsis can be found at this link, as this is just an example of what I am speaking to.

Now for a personal anecdote. I’ve been unemployed since February of 2009, and just recently, I was contacted by the US 2010 Census for work. I took the test (and scored pretty high too), and called them every couple of weeks to see what was up. Finally, I fielded a barrage of calls from them after months of silence, and this last Friday (April 16th), I was sworn in. As the group I was in was walked through the folder full of governmental documents, we came to the swearing-in document. Upon reading it, the code words “So help me God” caught my eye. The Asian gentleman who was giving us the run down was reading it off to us prior to the swearing-in. Oh crap, I thought silently, here we go. I raised my hand. “Yes?” “I’m an atheist.” The older fellow responded, “So?”, but his (much) younger assistant popped up with, “I can give him the alternative oath.” So as the rest of the group (9 people) were swearing and affirming to uphold the constitution “so help me god”, I was off to the side, using almost the same oath verbatim, sans the nod to on high. The only response outside of this was one elderly retired woman snorting derisively, but everyone else took it in stride. Once done, we were trained on how to fingerprint people (as we will be spending an entire day fingerprinting other enumerators), and there was no drama, no confrontations during or after the procedure. In fact, I had most of my co-workers alternately laughing or in stitches, and I let the snort go.

So, let’s try this gedankenexperiment – please share your positive experiences with other readers. Some time or another when you weren’t excoriated for your lack of religious dysfunction.

It might do you a bit of good – or me – or someone else. Masticate on it, and get back to me.

Till the next post, then.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace – Imagine, John Lennon

I recently watched this movie, and I have to say: I absolutely loved it.

Because, let’s admit it – as an atheist, I cannot abide dishonesty. It was the initial attraction it had for me after all. The uncompromising pedantry, the brutal clinical analysis of details, the utter logic of it. And religious people? They lie. Perhaps in small ways, even more so in large ways. The mental gymnastics of rationalizing their worldview, the  semantic dishonesty, the dance of belief so fragile that a light wind can shatter it and the denial afterwards.

So the plotline was a refreshing concept: a parallel world where nobody understands the concept of lying. Wow. What I wouldn’t give to live there, I tells ya. You’d know where you stood immediately with anyone you’d meet. Conversations where people never ever used ‘weasel words’. If you were going to score, you’d know it. Ask a question, and there’s no dancing about, just a straight answer.

And one of the more beautiful aspects of the flick, is that there was no such thing as religion. Not one jot nor tittle.

So one day, as shown in the trailer, Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) lies and gets more money from the bank than he has. He begins to experiment with this newfound ‘power’, much to our collective amusement.

And the big hit at the Judeo-Christian religion, is when his mother is lying in bed, scared of death, not wanting to go into cold nothingness, and Mark makes up a huge fib about what is obviously termed heaven here, and is overheard by the doctor and nurses. The ‘word’ spreads like wildfire, and people begin camping on his doorstep. So Mark writes the ‘nine commandments’ on the back of two pizza boxes, and addresses the crowd by telling them about the ‘man in the sky’. Much hilarity ensues.

I rather liked the subplot, where Mark is trying to woo Anna McDoogles (Jennifer Garner), who isn’t interested in him at all, and…well, watch the movie. Some critics didn’t like the idea of a dumpy little guy getting a hottie, but it does happen, and screw those shallow pricks anyways.

And some of the religious kooks weren’t too hot about it, anyways:

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film the three and a half stars out of four saying "in its amiable, quiet, PG-13 way, [it] is a remarkably radical comedy" while Empire gave the film 1 star out of 5 saying the "ramshackle plot detours into a hideously ill-conceived religious satire". The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops rated The Invention of Lying as "O – morally offensive"^] However, Xan Brooks of The Guardian was more favourable, giving the film four out of five stars, although he was critical of some aspects: "It is slick and it is funny. But it is also too obviously schematic, while that romantic subplot can feel awfully synthetic at times."

But hey, if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined the race.

Anyways, till the next post.

Make holiday, don’t weary of it ! Look there is no one allowed to take their things with them, and there is no one who goes away comes back again. – Lyric from the tomb of King Intef VI

It is no surprise to those of us who have studied religious history with an über-critical eye – the Semitic tribe of Israelites borrowed heavily from their neighbors or whichever society they happened to be living in the middle of. Obvious Genesis was a generalized copy of Sumerian/Babylonian mythology, the flood was lifted almost in toto from Gilgamesh, and I’m sure some of our gentle readers can likely extrapolate other various cases of direct (or indirect) ‘borrowing’ of or from mythologies in the Middle East.

The example today is about the Instruction of Amenemope:

Instruction of Amenemope (also called Instructions of Amenemopet, Wisdom of Amenemopet) is a literary work composed in Ancient Egypt, most likely during the Ramesside Period; it contains thirty chapters of advice for successful living, ostensibly written by the scribe Amenemope son of Kanakht as a legacy for his son. A characteristic product of the New Kingdom “Age of Personal Piety”, the work reflects on the inner qualities, attitudes, and behaviors required for a happy life in the face of increasingly difficult social and economic circumstances. It is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of ancient near-eastern wisdom literature and has been of particular interest to modern scholars because of its relationship to the biblical Book of Proverbs.

Proverbs, in fact, is probably the least insane of the books of the Bible.

Amenemope belongs to the literary genre of "instruction" (Egyptian sebayt). It is the culmination of centuries of development going back to the Instruction of Ptahhotep in the Old Kingdom^[. but reflects a shift in values characteristic of the New Kingdom's "Age of Personal Piety": away from material success attained through practical action, and towards inner peace achieved through patient endurance and passive acceptance of an inscrutable divine will.The author draws an emphatic contrast between two types of men: the "silent man", who goes about his business without drawing attention to himself or demanding his rights, and the "heated man", who makes a nuisance of himself to everyone and is constantly picking fights with others over matters of no real importance. Contrary to worldly expectation, the author assures his reader that the former will ultimately receive the divine blessing, while the latter will inevitably go to destruction. Amenemope counsels modesty, self-control, generosity, and scrupulous honesty, while discouraging pride, impetuosity, self-advancement, fraud, and perjury—not only out of respect for Maat, the cosmic principle of right order, but also because "attempts to gain advantage to the detriment of others incur condemnation, confuse the plans of god, and lead inexorably to disgrace and punishment."

One can very easily subtract all the supernatural ingredients, and still take most of the advice in that last sentence.

Though all extant copies of Amenemope are of a later date, the work is thought to have been composed in the Ramesside Period, during which the tribes of Israel first became a unified nation.Egyptian influence on Israel and Judah was particularly strong in the reigns of Solomon and Hezekiah during Egypt's Third Intermediate Period; as a result, "Hebrew literature is permeated with concepts and figures derived from the didactic treatises of Egypt", with Amenemope often cited as the foremost example. Even in his first brief publication of excerpts from Amenemope in 1922, Budge noted its obvious resemblance to the biblical wisdom books. He amplified these comments in his 1923 and 1924 publications, observing that the religiously based morality of Amenemope "closely resembles" the precepts of the Hebrew Bible, and adducing specific parallels between Amenemope and texts in Proverbs, Psalms, and Deuteronomy.  Others soon followed his lead.

There are (as there always is in the realm of Egyptology) disputes as to which came first, but the majority of scholars have ruled otherwise:

By the 1960s there was a virtual consensus among scholars in support of the priority of Amenemope and its influence on Proverbs. For example, John A. Wilson declared in the mid-twentieth century: "[W]e believe that there is a direct connection between these two pieces of wisdom literature, and that Amen-em-Opet was the ancestor text. The secondary nature of the Hebrew seems established." Many study Bibles and commentaries followed suit, including the Jerusalem Bible, introductions to the Old Testament by Pfeiffer and Eissfeldt, and others. The translators of the Catholic New American Bible, reflecting and extending this agreement, even went so far as to emend the obscure Hebrew text of Proverbs 22:19 (traditionally translated as "I have made known to you this day, even to you") to read "I make known to you the words of Amen-em-Ope."

There are of course text comparisons, and they tend to be startling. In the interest of brevity, I’ll only quote three:

(Proverbs 22:17-18):"Incline thine ear, and hear the words of the wise, And apply thine heart to my doctrine; For it is pleasant if thou keep them in thy belly, that they may be established together upon thy lips"

(Amenemope, ch1):"Give thine ear, and hear what I say, And apply thine heart to apprehend; It is good for thee to place them in thine heart, let them rest in the casket of thy belly; That they may act as a peg upon thy tongue"

(Proverbs 22:22):"Rob not the poor, for he is poor, neither oppress (or crush) the lowly in the gate."

(Amenemope, ch2):"Beware of robbing the poor, and oppressing the afflicted."

(Proverbs 22:24-5): "Do not befriend the man of anger, Nor go with a wrathful man, Lest thou learn his ways and take a snare for thy soul."

(Amenemope, ch10): "Associate not with a passionate man, Nor approach him for conversation; Leap not to cleave to such an one; That terror carry thee not away."

While some may say that plagiarism is too strong a word to use (ancient peoples did borrow from one another copiously, and without attribution was likely a foreign concept back in the day), the vast majority of the content can be directly or indirectly attributed to older cultures and mythologies.

Go figure.

Till the next post, then.

Christians love to make up warm and fuzzy sayings and stories about their imaginary friend. I received a religious email today that contained several of these dumbass quotes that are the romanticized inventions of delusional folks who think they are the special pet of an invisible god who controls all that they do, say and think while looking down from “up there”, (wherever “up there” is).

Here are a few from just the one email I received today:

“Whenever God Closes One Door He Always Opens Another, Even Though
Sometimes It’s Hell in the Hallway”

So, we are going along fine in life and this sadistic god slams it closed, tortures the shit out of us only to open another one? This statement just shows how much thought this was given….none.

A coincidence is a small miracle in which God chooses to remain anonymous.

No, a coincidence is a coincidence. A miracle is when human beings can’t stand not knowing an answer as to why or how something happened, so they make shit up. No grand cosmic puppetmaster is pulling any strings while playing hide and seek.

How about this one?

All true love is from God, and man receives the divine affection as he himself bestows this love upon his fellows.

Christians choose to disregard the fact that the god of their Bible is a sadistic, evil, destroying bastard. Examples of love and affection come from other human beings. Not from the god who had to create a son for himself to sacrifice (who is also supposedly himself at the same time) to allow to be tortured and murdered (and to commit suicide) in order to appease himself. In addition, many Xians are just nice to other people because they think that will make their god happy and they get extra reward points when they get to Heaven or something.

Here is another one:

“Blessed are those who have not seen, yet believe.”

I think the correct word here would be “deluded”, not blessed.

This is a good time to go ahead and get all those ghastly religious emails out of your systems.

Go ahead and vent. After enduring the religious holiday season, I am sure many of you will welcome the opportunity for random venting.