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But I Was Just Debating Evolution!
by Noah Lugeons
I have to admit that on some levels, I like trolls. I appreciate the effort it takes to engage in one losing effort after the next, hoping to chip away at an armor you know you can’t penetrate. It takes endurance and dedication to push your way into a room full of people aligned against you and then antagonize them ceaselessly, knowing the whole time that you’re ultimately going to lose the fight and probably get banned or blocked or whatever. I also like the way they maintain bridges and come up with clever riddles.
But what I don’t like is when they try to paint a veneer of intellectualism over their self-congratulatory, masturbatory hobby obsession. At least have the courage to admit that what you’re engaged in is impotent antagonism. Hell, my entire show is dedicated to the proposition of impotent antagonism and I’m not ashamed to admit it. But you’ll never hear me pretending that my show is an ‘intellectual’ endeavor. It’s a string of frustrated, powerless, antagonistic ramblings that may or may not make you laugh depending on the depravity of your sense of humor. There’s nothing intellectual about that.
Unfortunately, too few trolls are willing to be that honest with themselves. They like to pretend that their mom’s basement is a fortress; a lone citadel in fallen empire and that they are the final guardian of truth that shall persevere against the hordes of minds too broken to agree with what they themselves simply know to be true. Take as an example some sub-dermal infection that showed up here yesterday to point out what a bunch of homophobes atheists are.
In response to my post yesterday about whether or not atheists are “angry at god”, he left a seemingly innocuous comment asking what, precisely, atheists were so angry about.
I thought I’d made it clear in the post, but I’d also made it clear how bad theists are at understanding what “I don’t believe in your fairy tale” actually means, so I distilled the essence of the argument to a single sentence for him/her:
The implications of a group asserting social jurisdiction on the perceived authority of an imaginary being.
And while I already suspected something rotten under the bridge, it was not until then that the inquisitor revealed their troll-like nature. The response was to link to a blogpost so stupid it forces spontaneous neuronal suicide. I won’t be linking to it here (that jackass already has one undeserved link on my blog), but I can distill the point that this fucktard was trying to make in a quick syllogism:
- When I argue with atheists, sometimes they get upset and call me names.
- Sometimes these names include anti-gay slurs and implications that I love the cock.
- Ergo, all atheists are homophobes.
It may seem like a strange assertion to say that atheists, a group that is all but universally in favor of gay rights against an opposition that is all but universally religious in origin are somehow “anti-gay”. But don’t worry, this human-shaped pile of nut-butter wouldn’t make such an allegation without rock-solid evidence. Why, he/she presented several cherry-picked, out-of-context, unverifiable comments from a blog. Talk about incontrovertible! As we all know, if a person says something in the comments section of a website, clearly their statement is indicative of the larger feelings of whatever group you have chosen to associate them with.
So I politely pointed out that trolling is a dangerous game and that when you engage in it, you should know that at any point, you might get accused of taking it up the ass. And then this monkey-spunk-gargling scrotum wart offers a defense so stupid I had to blog about it:
I wasn’t trolling, I was debating evolution.
Oh, well in that case…
Look, if you want my intellectual sympathy, don’t start off by admitting that you were engaged in something that is almost criminally stupid. If you start the story with something like, “So I’m debating the theory of gravity…”, “So I’m trying to convince this guy that the moon really is made of green cheese…”, “So I’m arguing with this idiot who thinks water is somehow wet…” or, “I was debating evolution…” you’ve already revealed yourself to be a horribly misguided, intentionally ignorant promoter of wanton stupidity. And you think somehow that will shield you from the accusation of being a troll?
You can pretend that you’re “debating” evolution if you want to, but you’re lying and nobody believes the lie but you. The science is in, the data is conclusive, the proof is in the pudding: evolution is true. There is nothing to ‘debate’. Sure, there’s still plenty to learn and there is a healthy scholarly debate about the mechanisms and specifics of evolution, but if you’re trying to pretend that there’s an intellectually defensible way to debate the very fact that evolution happened, is happening and is responsible for the biodiversity we see on earth, you are not engaged in “debating”, it’s “denying”.
Oh… and trolling.
Does FEMA Discriminate Against Churches?
by Noah Lugeons
The temerity of religious leaders never fails to amaze me. As I peruse the various Christian and religious news outlets in search of news items for the next show, I constantly come across the most brazenly illogical fury and anger. Christians stand within their echo chamber so often that they often lose track of just how full of shit they are.
The latest source for Christian Op-Ed ire is FEMA’s policy against giving federal grants to churches to rebuild after natural disasters. I’ve come across a couple of articles where these pulpit-pounders rail against the bigoted, heartless, merciless policy that refuses to give lump sums of tax payer money to organizations that refuse to pay taxes.
Seems simple to me. If you don’t pay into the pool, you don’t get to take from it. How simple is that? If I get sick, I can’t use my brother-in-laws insurance to pay for treatment, can I? If I didn’t throw in on the bag, I don’t get to smoke any of the weed. It’s some pretty simple shit when you apply logic to it.
But Christians and logic don’t get along and that much is obvious from their irate opinions on this matter. In 3 articles I read on the subject, not one single author bothers to even address the issue of churches not paying taxes. It’s as though it doesn’t even occur to them that the rest of us actually pay those taxes. It’s as though they don’t recognize that it is anti-American and anti-intelligence to give my tax dollars to a church to rebuild. It’s as though they don’t even realize that they don’t actually serve a function in the real world.
Take this article from the Christian Post. Author Paul de Vries couldn’t be more livid about how unfairly the churches are being treated. After all, he points out that the churches were the first to respond to victims of the storm and now, when they need help, FEMA is nowhere to be found.
The first problem with his point is that it’s complete bullshit. The first responders were police officers, fire fighters, utility workers and paramedics (that’s why we call those people “first responders”). Sure, many churches opened their doors to the suddenly homeless and distributed food and water and medicine in the aftermath of the disaster. But, of course, that is the only function they serve in the world and the only possible justification for making them tax exempt in the first place.
Many secular groups also pitched in and helped in the aftermath of the storm and many secular people volunteered for days and weeks after to assist in the cleanup (myself included). The secular groups were far more effective, of course, as they spent none of their time trying to evangelize and proselytize to the people who were coming to them for help.
But the preachers, pastors and priests would have you believe that if it weren’t for all those Christians, nobody would have been helping at all.
De Vries points out that religious organizations gave tens of millions of dollars to help the storm’s victims, but somehow it doesn’t occur to him that if FEMA started wasting its money rebuilding churches, they would be, in effect, taking back the money they just donated. What kind of slippery logic does one have to employ to argue that the fact that Christians gave money to the disaster somehow means that the disaster owes them money?
He calls the policy bigoted (despite the fact that it treats all houses of worship equally), he calls it “a severe penalty” (despite the fact that it isn’t a penalty no matter how broadly one defines penalty… it’s not like FEMA is billing them) and he even goes so far as to call it “a step down an insane and sinister slope”, arguing that before we know it they’ll be denying churches the use of police officers and firefighters.
I’m all for that, of course. If you don’t pay taxes you shouldn’t get any government services. That being said, I’m not in charge of anything but this blog and a podcast. I’m not making the law. The notion that the government is going to stop sending cops and firefighters to churches is almost too stupid to acknowledge, and it is too stupid to bother to refute. I only bring it up to point out that even when they name the logical fallacy within the logical fallacy, they still don’t see the logical fallacy.
But by far the worst collection of words in his whole self-aggrandizing treatise of nonsense is this one:
blocking FEMA grants to churches is to pretend to be ignorant of the continuing soul care needed by the many and various victims of Superstorm Sandy.
I should point out that those are his italics up there. I didn’t even need to highlight the clause that makes the statement such ravenous horse-shit. One of his arguments is that without these grants, churches can’t take care of the victim’s souls.
Now keep in mind that there’s not just some money-wizard down at FEMA who conjures up wads of cash or anything. They’re actually calling for money to be redirected to churches. They are actually asking that money that would otherwise go toward rebuilding homes and vital businesses go to churches instead. We should actually take money from the “make sure kids have roofs over their heads” fund and the “make sure employees have a place to go to earn a living fund” and give it to a useless vestigial cancer that needs it to take care of the imaginary man that lives in our brains and drives our body.
So go fuck yourself, Paul. If you want disaster relief, pay your fucking taxes.
My Least Favorite Meme
by Noah Lugeons
I find it disheartening the way that Christians (and those affiliated with other brands of idiocy) think that a perfectly acceptable answer to the debate is:
I am ignorant of your side of the argument and refuse to learn.
While the atheists I know tend to me more knowledgeable about religion than the religious, the Jebus-lovers love to flaunt there nescience by making points like:
If we descended from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys?
Not only does this reveal them to be feeble-minded dolts, it also betrays an utter refusal to actually understand what they’re arguing about. And if they haven’t betrayed it yet, they certainly will when you try to explain the notion of a common ancestor.
Which brings us to one of the most ubiquitous and ridiculous of Christian memes, which I have answered in a way that I have to imagine many have answered before:
…But I’m Not That Crazy…
by Noah Lugeons
It never fails to amaze me the way one religious person can look at the beliefs of an alternate faith and say, “well, that’s just silly” without realizing that the same is true of their own sacred cow.
I’m reminded of my freshman anthropology class. The professor was talking about the early signs of religion in human history and he spoke at length about the tribal magic of ancient cultures. A girl who was in the process of learning that college was for smart people looked puzzled and asked, “how could they believe in magic if it didn’t work?”
I glanced back at the crucifix hanging around her neck and then back to the prof to see how he would handle the question. I could see him biting the words “why do you pray?” back as they tried to escape. He was nicer than me. So I said it.
“People still believe in prayer and that doesn’t work,” I offered, much to the disgust of the inquisitor.
But somehow people can switch to a different set of eyes when they are looking at what is considered holy by the other guy. They can see how untenable and silly any religion is but their own. Even within their faith they can point to one belief of another and say, “well, I don’t believe in that, but I believe in this”. They offer it up as though clearly believing that a talking snake is silly, but a man sacrificing himself to himself to appease himself is quite defensible.
Poor Mitt Romney is finding this out the hard way. As he desperately seeks the republican presidential nomination he finds himself constantly butting up against the common prejudice that Christians have against other Christians. Of course, his liberal history as Massachusetts governor isn’t helping him either, but a number of reports overlook his support of jesus-ish policies like universal healthcare and go straight for his faith.
He’s a Mormon, of course, and those people are just weird. They believe that a magical space man came to America to teach people the ways of heaven. Of course, all the thinking folks understand that magical space men only go to the Middle East to reveal such things. Mormons think that God lives on some planet out in space when all the critical minds know that he lives in a different dimension paved in streets of gold. Mormons believe that special underwear can protect them from harm when smart people know that it takes water blessed by an ancient incantation to truly keep you safe.
It always strikes me odd that we atheists are often the only defense that small religions have against big ones. The general rule is that everyone is in favor of separation of church and state except the nation’s largest church. When the “ground zero mosque” was in the news it was largely the secular institutions (and, at the very least the secular community) that stood up and said, “hey, their stupidity is no more stupid than your stupidity.”
Evangelical journalist and general fucktard Warren Cole Smith was recently quoted as saying:
“You can’t say that his religious beliefs don’t matter but his ‘values’ do. If beliefs are false, then behavior will eventually–but inevitably–be warped.”
Smith, of course, would not tolerate this type of blatant and inexcusable bigotry if it was directed at his sacred cow. Interestingly enough, he accidentally pinpoints the source of his hypocrisy within that brief statements. His beliefs are false and his behavior is warped.
The Scathing Atheist 