Industrial grade crazy haters come from Westboro Baptist, led by Fred Phelps. Westboro Baptist is bringin’ the hate to Hermitige High School in Richmond, VA on Tuesday, March 2nd. My cousin, and others, are going to counter protest. If you can, I encourage you to join.
As the year comes to an end, I encounter a late but potent entry in the category of “what has been seen cannot be unseen”: hardcore Star Trek cosplay.
There’s not enough Romulan ale in the universe.
No, I will not link to it.
The Italian Finance Police are investigating allegations of price fixing by a cartel… of pasta makers. I believe they misunderstand the situation. Obviously, this is not price fixing at all, but instead are compulsory religious tithes demanded by those touched by His Noodly Appendage.
These totalitarian raids by the state gestapo are nothing more than thinly veiled religious biggotry. The Pastafarians will not relent, and will not be silenced. Rise up in the cafeterias and stab them with your plastic forks!
rAmen.
USA Today has an article discussing the difficulties of determining how early Christianity developed. It mentions (in no great detail, being only moderately better at news than a tabloid) how various models give wildly different results with very small changes in assumed variables.
The article goes on to note that new promise is shown in a new form of social modeling – the same method of network analysis used by epidemiologists.
There you have it, follks. Religion is a disease.
I’m posting this on its own, with a clear title rather than my typical goofy titles, because I don’t want this message lost within another nor unfairly tainting the content of another.
My take on marriage, same-sex or otherwise, is this – “Marriage” is the province of religion, and I am not certain why secular government takes any position on it at all.
There are many good reasons for the state to allow and establish familial relationships between consenting adults. These reasons include, but certainly are not limited to, concerns regarding taxation, assignment of property, rearing of children and related parental duties, speaking on another’s behalf in time of crisis, establishment of privileged access with respect to 5th Amendment rights, and so forth.
These are all concerns in which the state has a valid, vested interest, and this all remains unequivocally true for all consenting adults* without regard for race, creed, color, age*, or gender. If the state sees fit to establish such ties in the name of civil union at all, there is no secular reason to deny those ties based on arbitrary demographics, whatever those might be. There is also no good secular reason to confuse the state’s needs in said civil unions by invoking the religious notion of marriage in its description.
I understand that the needs and views of a church or religious order might be different. That’s fine, the church is under no obligation to perform the ceremony. A justice of the peace, however, as a public servant, should be, and under the guidance of our 1st Amendment rights, no church or other religious influence should be in a position to establish public policy to the contrary.
I understand that you find it icky, or morally repugnant, or depraved, or what have you, but it ain’t your relationship. Mind your own.
Election day was yesterday. Ballots always include referendums, and Maine included this:
Do you want to reject the new law that lets same-sex couples marry and allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?
Now, I don’t care what you believe. I’ll talk about the content of the questions later. Right now I want to address the form of the question.
This, like a great many questions on charged issues, is worded very poorly. Add to that the fact that it is a multi-part question, and no matter how the votes tally, I defy you to claim it in any way reflects a consensus view. When attempting to establish public policy by consensus, steering the issue with blatant obfuscation ought not be tolerated.
No referendum question should ever be more difficult to interpret or answer than “Do you want a cookie?” If yours is, then it needs to be rewritten and, possibly, asked as multiple questions. So let’s take this one on, splitting it on the “and”.
“Do you want to reject the new law that lets same-sex couples marry” – what is this asking, anyway? The intent of the question is unclear beyond “do you reject the new law”. It’s possible you think the law is poorly crafted, but don’t otherwise have an objection to gay marriage. It’s possible you reject gay marriage on face. It’s possible you may object for other reasons. It’s possible it may not matter how it is interpreted, but most likely it does. Better to ask in the form of “do you want a cookie?”, or “Should gay marriage be allowed, yes or no”
The second part of the question – “[should the law allow] individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?” is at least straight-forward. The problem is that, as part of a multi-part question, you have to either accept all premises or reject all premises. You may be alright with gay marriage, but object to practitioners being able to opt out. You may object to gay marriage, but prefer – should it exist – that practitioners not be obligated to perform such ceremonies.
And, on the whole, it would be better to determine the will of the people before rather than after the law has been passed.
I don’t mean to pick on Maine, it just happens to be the referendum I plucked in exemplar. There are any of dozens more on dozens of other topics from many, many states I could have also used. My whole point is that confusing questions yield useless results.
Maybe, though, that is the point. It could be that those who write such questions are counting on muddy waters as a means to simply getting their way. If this is true, if this is a means to foist one group’s pet views on the whole, it is a sad thing and ultimately does a disservice to the whole.
For that, you get no cookie.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Father Cutié has been removed from service by the Miami, FL archdiocese of the Catholic church. Archbishop Favalora said of Cutié that he was “deeply disappointed”. Favalova said also, in a written statement, that “Father Cutie’s actions have caused grave scandal within the Catholic Church, harmed the Archdiocese of Miami — especially our priests — and led to division within the ecumenical community and the community at large.” (source)
This is a grave scandal? This harms the church? It is disturbing – no, repugnant – that the same organization that has institutionalized child abuse, and claimed that such was an internal matter of which they were unaware of any legal considerations while moving people around in such a way as to perpetuate the abuse, now claims, straight-faced, that an adult, consenting, heterosexual relationship is a scandal. It is repugnant that this group claims to be of moral fiber with any credibility. This should raise a level of disgust beyond measure. People should be bailing out of the church in droves. Yes, I’m talking to my own family here, pass the word along.
There is no moral, intellectual, spiritual, theistic, biblical, societal, or historical basis for this level of sociopathic behavior.
Shove your ecumenical community up your ass. You should be ashamed to represent what it is you currently stand for.
From The Barefoot Bum: Picking and Choosing:
The question we should ask of the religious is not whether they pick and choose, but what do they not pick and choose? What stays constant? What cannot be ignored? What stands as true, literally true? [...] With regard to religion, where is this line?
It is a fair question, and one that took me years with which to come to peace. It is a process that, among other reasons, removed me from the church (I quip – it’s not faith that’s the problem, it’s organized religion) (I quip again – there’s nothing worse than an organized anything)
Just to save you jumping to the end, I’ll go ahead and give you the answer up front – I believe. Now, let me tell you what and why.
I’ll start with “what”, if only for dramatic effect. I believe in God. I believe that God is all-knowing and all-powerful. I believe that God is with us and in us every moment of every day. I believe that, ultimately, we will all have to answer to God’s judgement.
My, but doesn’t that just ring loud with Judeo-Christian goodness? Golly, my Sunday school teacher would be proud!
Ah, but wait – all is not as it seems in Squatchland. It sounds Judeo-Christiany because I was raised Judeo-Christiany (specifically, Catholic) and it is simply a matter of comfort and convenience to frame it in such language. Not that I don’t believe those things, it’s just that what they mean to me might not be what you would expect.
“Still,” you’re thinking, “cynical, skeptical you?”
OK, fine, you’re not thinking that… but you should be. I am skeptical. And very cynical. And it is actually those elements that found Faith.
I don’t cotton well to being told things. Skipping the deeper exploration into why this is, let’s just say being told to believe in God was reason enough not to. And it was very easy not to believe in God. I mean, it’s not like denying His existence prompted him to show up and say, “We-he-helllll, young man, the joke’s on you, now, isn’t it?” So for years I didn’t believe. And this was fine with me.
Until I started dabbling in amateur philosophy. “Come on, man,” the peddlers would say, “the first insight’s free.” Oh, but the price you pay! Soon I was debating cultural relativism on street corners for my fix, spending hours down dark alleys refuting the concept of “right and wrong”. Within a year I was a full-blown victim of Liberal Education, sans the education (different story), and was aimlessly drifting the planet like Schrodinger’s Bot, neither clued nor unwashed, yet both at once. These were dark years.
At my lowest point, tired of merely blowharding about other’s philosophical works, I began to experiment with “rolling my own”. I already didn’t believe in God. What else could I not believe in?
Could I not believe in, say, China? Well – I’ve heard about it all my life, and I’ve seen pictures, but I’ve never actually been there, soooooo – yeah. China might be an elaborate hoax. And it progressed from there. Finding ways to explain away places and things, one at a time and in categories, slowly whittling it down until I was left with one thing I could not explain away. I was left with little old me.
And before you point it out, yes, this is Descartes’ disbelief, but I swear I had taken myself completely through this process long before I ever read anything he wrote. Silence, Knave, you’ll have your say at the end, ‘Kay? ‘Kay.
I whittled it down to me, but the spiritual me. A disembodied consciousness (“because,” I reasoned, “if something has enough control over my senses to hoax everything else, then it certainly has enough control to hoax me into believing I have a body.”) In the end, I was down to myself as a collection of thoughts, memories, and responses to stimuli, prodded along by a small collection of “inputs” or “senses”. But the more time I spent in the deep end of the pool, the more I was reasoning in terms of “if something has enough control”. I kept coming back to “if something”. Just me and “if something”, adrift in a vacuum. I learned much later that Rene’ called “if something” an “Evil Genie”.
Now I had a new puzzle. Could I rectify “myself” and “something” into one cohesive package? The only way this works is if I am the “something”, and am hiding all of the input controls from myself. That is, if I and Something are the same thing, then I am only a part – a subset – of Something, and the Something as a whole must be greater than me…
It all unravels from there. Every time I found a way to pack this or that away as possibly being a trick on my senses, I was making it part of “Something”. And this works, even without bringing in religious notions at all. Every rock, tree, you, me, and the stars on the far edge of the universe, we are all Spacedust, all just “crud” condensed from the Big Bang. Everything is part of the one big Something.
Rene’ said “Evil Genie”. I chose to call it God, because it seems to loosely fit the bill. It might be, by this reasoning, that God is nothing more than “stuff” and the laws of physics. I’m alright with that. Play along just a bit more, we’re almost there – remember what I said at the beginning? Those things I believe?
“All Knowing” – God “knows” everything about every fleck of matter in existence by “being” every fleck of matter in existence.
“All Powerful” – Existing as every fleck of matter, nothing happens in the universe that does not bodily involve “God” (the stuff) or “God’s Will” (physics)
Since you are part of the “stuff” of the universe, you are part of “God” and “God is with you”
And, as for judgement, ultimately forces beyond our control will decide what is to become of the “stuff” of which we are made.
Do I think God is some sort of loving, nurturing, blah blah blah? Uh- no. I don’t think “God”, under this line of reasoning, is any more aware of us than I am of a particular blood cell in my ankle. It’s there, it’s serving a purpose, but if it dies, it’s not really going to affect me on any appreciable scale. Any personification of this is romantic nonsense.
It might be that the Universe is self-aware. It might be that the uncertainty in quantum mechanics is “God” thinking. But it doesn’t even matter if this is true, because we are never going to register on its level, and we’d never be able to follow Universe-sized thoughts on ours. I don’t “love” God, and have no particular sense that God “loves” me.
So if I’m just back to believing in spacedust and physics, tinted by a few intellectual liberties, why bother calling it God at all?
Like I said, on the important high points, it fits the bill. It’s still interesting to me that the sense of an external “something else” survives a rational process. And there’s something psychologically comforting about the notion of a “higher power”, whatever that may be.
And as far as the Barefoot Bum’s question, where is that line? What stays true and never moves? It is this – there is Me, and there is Something Else, and coming to peace with that, ultimately, is up to you.