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Fred Phelps to Protest Memorial Service in Joplin, MO
by Noah Lugeons
There is no level of vile, inhumane, despicable, heinous, venomous heartlessness that would be considered unreasonable for the Westboro Baptist Church. There is no limit to their thoughtless bigotry. There is no act so unconscionable that we would put it passed Fred Phelps and his loyal band of homophobes.
No sooner had the dust settled over the devastation in Joplin, Missouri than the WBC was loudly proclaiming it to be the latest act of their spiteful and small-minded deity. Their website proudly proclaims this vast smiting to be yet another example of their fag-hating-god and his insatiable blood lust.
Filled with phrases like “We pray for your destruction…”, “God will not acquit you evil beasts of MO (who have sex with animals among your filthy sins)…” and, perhaps most telling of the dark and tortured part of the psyche their religiosity comes from, “Too many dead bodies to bury! That’s God’s Glory!”, their letter of praise to their vicious and petty lord reads like a love letter to death.
And they make it clear that this occasion requires the use of their most familiar weapon; bigoted picket signs.
It amazes me that our nation’s admirable defense of open-mindedness is such a ready tool for the small-minded. Our principled refusal to shut these people up exonerates our nation from the charges that Phelps levels against it (though I’m not sure it exonerates Obama from the charge of being the Anti-Christ). We, as a nation, are considerate even of the inconsiderate.
That is admirable if problematic. Putting up with the ranting, inbred fucktardery of people like Fred Phelps is a small price to pay for free speech and open dialogue. I just hope that there are plenty of us who are willing to stoop to Phelps level when he dies.
I’ve heard a lot of talk about protesting at Phelps funeral… or at least using it as an excuse to have a party as close to his funeral as legally allowable. I might be in for that, but ultimately it would be pointless. He’ll be dead and decomposing and won’t have the remotest inkling that anything ever happened. If you really wanted to turn the tables on him, it would have to be the funeral of his wife or a beloved son. Only then could he glean the slightest understanding of the suffering he’s caused to so many grieving parents.
But even then, his moral absolutism would shield him. When people speak for god, they are invincible. All who speak of god are in some way responsible for the misanthropy of douche-nozzles like Phelps. By empowering an invisible, fictional character with absolute ethical authority you leave a void where any lunatic who chooses to can stand in and speak for him. After all, it’s not like god can speak for himself. Does it matter if two people who claim to speak for the same imaginary space-daddy say different things? How can one message be more valid than the other?
Harold Camping: 3rd Time’s the Charm!
by Noah Lugeons
This is why I’ll never understand the faithful. Harold Camping predicted the rapture would happen on September 7th of 1994. When that didn’t happen, he predicted it again in 2011.
So let’s try to get beyond that first. You fail in predicting something as grandiose as the fucking rapture, you shouldn’t be qualified to guess weight at a carnival from that point forward. If a scientist predicted the end of the world and then it failed to pass, nobody on this planet would listen to anything that scientist said again but to mock it.
But religion doesn’t work that way. Harold Camping got a mulligan.
And it wasn’t even like his followers were slightly less credulous the second time around. It would be easy to say that after being burned once you’d at least accept the possibility that he was going to come up short again this time. But if you look at the results from this latest failure it seems that if anything, their faith in their leader increased. At the very least their financial support grew if the national advertising blitzkrieg is anything to judge by.
From my rational, atheistic point of view it seems like the idea of going out to witness the end of mankind again would be a red flag in itself. But not for these unquestioning Camp-ites. They are doubly sure this time because they were wrong the time before.
Different year, same result. No rapture. And Camping gets a mulligan.
That’s right. Camping has spoken. Turns out that the rapture did occur on Saturday. I figured as much… as though he might suggest that us linen-wearing, indiscriminate meat-eaters weren’t good enough to be spared, but he chose the more “loving Jesus” approach to the whole thing.
Camping’s explanation for why the rapture failed to happen is simple. Jesus reappeared and took a look at humanity and his big-old Jesusy heart just couldn’t bear to put us through all that torment. But have no fears, Camping isn’t backing off from his original October deadline for the actual end of the world. He’s just saying that Christ didn’t have the heart to rapture his loyal followers up to sky-candy land. Seems that this pang of conscience didn’t extend to not actually killing everyone and sending the vast majority to an eternity of suffering in Hell.
I’m sure Camping lost some of his flock, but if even one person is still clinging to the ramblings of this deranged old kook it is one too many. Come to think of it, I feel the same way about Jesus.
A Letter to the Pope: Saint Starbucks
by Noah Lugeons
Yet again, the papacy has spent a week highlighting its own ineptitude. The reign of Pope Benedict XVI continues to be marked by a long and embarrassing series of revelations as to the depth of the sex abuse scandal, broken only by misguided and increasingly asinine attempts to recover their public image.
This week began with the pope issuing yet another new guideline for dealing with accusations of clerical abuse. Yet again the report failed to recognize the institutional role in the scandal and again put the power over these matters in the hands of the local bishops who have the greatest incentive to cover things up. This latest revision reduces the focus on outside groups unaffiliated with the church. What’s worse is that they continue to act as though the correct response to this abomination is to handle it within the church rather than allow the courts to deal with it in the way that secular societies demand.
But this was only the first fuck-up this week and Pope Benny is nothing if not an overachiever. To further embarrass the pontiff, a new report was released a few days later detailing a long study of the root causes of the unchecked pedophilia. The study, funded entirely by the church and collected from data provided entirely by the church, took four years and cost upwards of $2 million.
The John Jay College of Criminal Justice published the findings of the report a few days ago and strangely enough, very little of the blame was placed on the institution itself and its policy of 3-pedophile-Monte. Instead, they chose to blame those damn kids with their long hair and their rock music.
Through it all, Pope Benny hangs his head in shame and wishes old Harold Camping had been right about the rapture. He’s tried his damnedest to produce a newsworthy story about Catholics that doesn’t include the words “child” and “molestation” in conjunction. They’ve put John Paul in the beatification express line and waived all the normal waiting periods and traditional taboos in hopes of cashing in on the popularity of the pope who actually presided over the pedophilia scandal. But it’s not enough.
Well, ever since he pulled me free from that alligator infested phone booth (remind me to tell you the story sometime), I feel like I owe Pope Benny and in his hour of need I want to be there for him. So I’ve come up with an idea that might help take the focus of their literal translation of the whole “coming unto the children” bit: E-Bay Canonizations.
Think of the potential here. The Vatican could engage a younger, more internet savvy audience, they could raise some money to make up for the billions they’ve paid out in hush money to rape victims, they would get new pagan idols to pray to and, best of all, the outrage would take some of the focus off the sex abuse scandal and the Catholic Church’s appalling stance on contraception.
I can see the papacy resisting this idea, of course. If you just offer sainthood to the highest bidder than you couldn’t end up venerating PZ Myers or Steven Colbert so I also come bearing a plan B. You could just establish a market rate for sainthood and attach a rider that allows you to boot us heretical non believers. I would imagine any company that does heavy business in South America would be happy to pay a premium for an officially recognized canonization.
If that’s too much, you could even give existing saints sponsors. I could see a defense attorney shelling out big bucks to sponsor Saint Jude. Blue Cross/Blue Shield could start a bidding war with Humana over Saint Luke. For a smaller fee, a local doctor could sponsor Saint Werenfridus, the patron saint of stiff joints.
I know this idea might sound extreme, but it will cost a hell of a lot less than your bullshit study and it couldn’t possibly make you look stupider than you look endorsing a study that blames your institutional indiscretion on the Love Generation.
Crucifying Straw Men
by Noah Lugeons
The collective voice of the non believers cried out in a chorus of criticism this week as a small contingent of Christian kooks camped out to await the rapture. Twitter was alive with jokes like “No rapture? Don’t sweat it. It’s not the end of the world”, “If the rapture doesn’t happen Saturday Christianity’s cancelled right?” and “So can I have the Vatican when you’re gone?” We laughed at their gullibility. We laughed at their mindless adherence to a numerological interpretation of a poorly written compendium of ancient mythology. But between the jokes and insults, we also roundly criticized them for perpetuating such a moronic belief.
Of course, Saturday came and went with the same number of raptures as the Saturday before that and now as Harold Camping’s disillusioned followers slowly start to reassemble their lives. Largely we’ve stopped picking on them and moved back to picking on Christians and faithful folks in a more general sense.
But there’s also been a backlash against our criticism. Many within the religious community are now faulting the atheists for “attacking the extremes”. This is a pretty common critique; that non believers find the most outlandish and ridiculous examples of Christianity and then hold them up as examples as though they represented the average Christian. When Bill Maher’s film Religulous debuted, the majority of critics accused him of only showing the lunatic fringe of faith without mentioning that it was not an accurate representation of Christians in general.
But is that a fair criticism? Do we really only attack straw men? And if we do, is that really a bad thing?
This weekend provides the perfect example. Sure, an overwhelming majority of Christians were not expecting the rapture to occur yesterday. They correctly predicted that Harold Camping and his ministry were full of shit. So is it fair to paint all Christians with the same brush strokes you use to cover these religiou-tards?
Well, I would argue that it is. The rational people rejected Harold Camping because he was an idiot numerologist that thinks the bible is the word of god. The religious people rejected Harold Camping because they thought he had the math wrong.
Christians expend a lot of effort trying to distance themselves from the more extreme end of their spectrum. When Fred Phelps protests at military funerals, the Jesus-ites are quick to remind us that he is doesn’t speak for them. He is a small and insignificant extremist with a warped view of Christianity and they cannot be judged by his nonsense any more than atheists can be judged by the random mental ejaculations of Joe Rogan.
On its surface, that seems like a fair argument. After all, you can’t say Catholics are murderers just because Hitler was a Catholic. You can’t say that scientists are all full of shit just because Andrew Wakefield was a scientist. If you don’t bother to examine it very deeply, the charge that we attack straw men seems fair.
But it isn’t. Fred Phelps didn’t decide that God Hated Fags. It’s written right there in the Christian instruction book. Harold Camping didn’t decide that the world was going to end like the intro to a Michael Bay movie, it’s a major tenet of their faith. These people are simply taking the accepted beliefs of the larger group and carrying them to their logical conclusion.
When Christians faulted Camping by quoting Matthew 24:36 they acted as though this was somehow less stupid than Camping’s original claims. But polls show that the majority of Christians do believe in the same fanciful crap that he was selling. How can you fault one man for assigning it a date without also faulting the moronic set of beliefs that got him there?
Socially conscious Christians do their best to sweep the fundamentalists under the rug. They like to pretend that these are just the insane ramblings of someone who “doesn’t get” Christianity. But all the fundamentalists do is take the crap that mainstream preachers pretend to believe seriously. Some pastors and parishioners might tell these stories with a nod and a wink, but how can they fault someone for taking them seriously when they say that to do otherwise is a ticket to eternal damnation?
Fundamentalism is a predictable and even necessary offshoot of religion. Anyone who endorses the bible as the “word of god” is guilty of fostering them. Anyone who has ever given a dime to a church is guilty of harboring them. Anyone who ever told their children that there was a lake of fire where the bad people spend eternity is responsible for creating them.
Christianity cannot divorce itself from the extremists until they admit publicly that the bible is just a collection of prehistoric essays. Until they admit that Jesus has no more substance than Santa Claus, they are just as guilty as the people holding the protest signs or giving away their worldly belongings in time to get raptured.
You can’t blame an idiot for being an idiot. The only recourse is to stop feeding the stupid.
The Scathing Atheist 