Quote of the Week

As quoted in the movie Of Gods and Men:

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it for religious conviction".
Blaise Pascal.

Amen, brother!

Mork from Ork

I finally finished reading Lawrence Wright's meticulous and extraordinarily damaging exposé of the bizarreness that is Scientology and boy, it gets better as you read along. Nothing new under the sun: Scientology is nothing other than a cult (we knew that). It separates people from their money and from their families and from their common sense. It is based on the loony science fiction ideas of a guy that looks like a Tupperware salesman circa 1950. But I think the reason it has been so successful is that, in contrast to other loony cults, which sometimes idolize charismatic con artists or believe in impossible utopias, this one couches its beliefs in the mumbo jumbo of self-help, a topic dear and inexhaustible to the citizens of this nation. Self-help gurus seem to be a quintessentially American travesty, and Scientology just seems better organized and wealthier than most.  In Germany it is banned and recognized as a cult. Here they should do the same. If the FBI finds evidence, as the article claims, of slave labor and financial shenanigans (it has protected tax status as a church), it should be prosecuted and penalized accordingly. What is amazing is that it has been allowed to thrive mostly unimpeded and this must be because of its shiny aura of success and its connection to celebrities, since as you all know being a celebrity in this country pretty much guarantees you can act outside the law. On the surface, Scientology doesn't seem to be utterly bat-shit like the Branch Davidians, or those people who drank the Kool-Aid. But some of their crazier teachings are hidden for a reason; they are wacky and sinister at the same time. A lot of people think that Scientology is a religion like any other, but one of the important differences between a religion and a cult is that in a religion you are not coerced to believe. You are free to profess your faith in your own personal way without punishment or coercion.
In any case, my advice to you dear readers is that you don't become scientologists.  You will be spending too much money to believe in stuff zanier than a sci-fi comic book.

Faith No More

A parable, my little grasshoppers:

So I am walking by myself through the main temple at Angkor Wat, ahead of hosts of tourists who are still clicking away at the last remnants of sunrise over the Wat, and I come across a man, dressed in a gray Mao collar shirt, who stands in front of a little shrine with a statue of a placidly (is there any other way?) sitting Buddha.
The man entreats me to offer incense to the statue. I demur. He says it will give me good luck. No, thank you. He insists, as if implying who could be so stupid and have a soul so black as to deny themselves good luck with such a simple, innocent gesture?
As he will not back down, I relent. I take the wand of incense, follow a little ritual as he tells me, and stick it in the sandy urn in front of Buddha, who remains unfazed.
I feel absolutely nothing. No relief, no joy, no peace, no anger, no impatience, no grace. NOTHING. Have I inadvertently achieved Nirvana? Perhaps.
Once I am done, the man lifts up a little piece of fabric in front of the Buddha and reveals a crisp five dollar bill. That's when I bark.
No, I say. I didn't want to do this for a reason.
I do not rant at him that it is not the money, or the fact that he is clearly a con artist, and that not all of us gullible foreigners are like Liz Gilbert eating and praying and loving our way through exotic locales.
Some of us just like our reality hard assed. We take the world as it is and deal with it.
And what does spirituality have to do with money anyway?

I do not care if your God does yoga and never breaks a sweat, if He is sitting in a throne in the sky having tantrums mostly with Himself, if He has managed to piss off the authorities enough to get nailed to a cross, or doesn't find Scandinavian cartoons funny. I have no faith, and yet my life is rich and very meaningful.
Please leave me alone.

On this trip I visited many beautiful temples.
The only place where I felt an intense urge to kneel down, bow my head, shed bitter tears and offer some sort of prayer, was at the Killing Fields in Cambodia. I felt the need to acknowledge to the bones of 17,000 men, women and children, that I was ashamed and despairing of their suffering and that they were not forgotten.

On Bullying

When I was growing up, you got bullied if you were:
Too fat
Too skinny
Too smart
Too stupid
Too poor
Too rich
Too good
Too mean
Too dirty
Too clean
Too clumsy
Too tall
Too short
Too religious
Not religious enough
Too white
Brown
A different color
Ugly
A nerd
Bad at sports
Great at math
Wearing glasses
Having freckles
Kinky hair
Greasy hair
Big boobs
No boobs
A big schlong
A tiny schlong
A tomboy
A fag
A slut
A "nun"

Different.

Bullying is evil and should be eradicated whoever the victim, for whatever the reason.

Now, educators in certain mostly suburban school boards across the country recently decided to expand their guidelines against bullying in schools by including bullying against gay kids or gay parents, as it should be. And now some religious people are complaining that those guidelines are fostering a "hidden homosexual agenda".
I think the problem is in the approach, which invokes the teaching of tolerance to kids. To tolerate is to suffer someone else. We need to be more than tolerant. We need to respect others. Tolerance leaves the door open for plenty of dissent and interpretation. However, if we leave the touchy feely idea of tolerance aside and we use more emphatic terms, there is no argument.  Instead of telling children they need to be more tolerant of everyone around them, somebody should lay down the law:
You are not to pester, harass, harm, offend, threaten or hurt anybody physically or verbally, on the basis that they look, think, behave, believe, speak, dress, act, and love differently than you do.
(Because if you do, The Grande Enchilada is gonna personally show up and rip you to shreds, understood?)
After we lay down the law, we can certainly teach children to respect each others' differences and kumbaya, etc, etc.
Bullying because of sexual orientation needs to be included in every anti-bullying curriculum in every school in the universe, let alone the country. However, as long as we don't have federal laws in this country that protect people from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation, how can we expect society at large to follow suit? Our lawmakers are way behind the times in terms of the reality American citizens live in on a daily basis, in absolutely every aspect of their lives, at home, at school, in the workplace, at the doctor's office, in the hospital, in the army, everywhere.
As long as gay people don't have fully equal rights under the law, we are going to witness crazy, unproductive arguments like this until the end of time.

Read Your Bible

                                                 Read, you putzes!

Thanks to my friend Cathy (and Facebook, lately almost my only source of news) I was alerted to this (from NPR):

The Pew Forum on Religious Religion and Public Life released a survey on religious knowledge today. Atheists and Agnostics scored higher on it than anyone else, closely followed by Jews and Mormons, all Christians, Protestants and Catholics, were far behind.

That's overall, but when you get into specific religions it does show a startling lack of basic knowledge by practitioners. From the report:

More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

The study also showed that Americans have a fairly poor understanding of religions other than their own. Only about half of the people surveyed know that Martin Luther inspired the Reformation, the Dalai Lama is Buddhist, and Joseph Smith was a Mormon.

Atheists and Agnostics scored higher on it than anyone else, closely followed by Jews and Mormons.  Well, excuse me, but I really resent this classification. I am an Atheist Jew, so that must mean I am Bible Expert Number One.
Number two, I think this is more a reflection of how stoopid and ignorant Americans are, rather than agnostics and atheists being geniuses at religion.
I took the quiz. It is so basic, it's appalling. I'm proud to report that I missed just one of the 15 answers and I think it was a trick question.
This useful bit of info is certainly welcome these days, but it is hardly surprising. Agnostics and atheists may not only know more about religion, we actually comport ourselves according to most of the better values of said beliefs, rather than pay hypocritical lip service, in the best of cases, or in the worst, use our special relationship with God to be thoroughly disgusting and abusive human beings (The Pope, The Taliban, all fundamentalists, the ultra-orthodox in Israel, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, televangelists, etc).

Why are Atheists and Agnostics better informed? The Los Angeles Times quotes one of the researchers who has a theory:

American atheists and agnostics tend to be people who grew up in a religious tradition and consciously gave it up, often after a great deal of reflection and study, said Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum.

"These are people who thought a lot about religion," he said. "They're not indifferent. They care about it."

Also interesting is that Black Protestants and Latino Catholics scored at the bottom of the survey.

I have another theory: people don't read. The less people read, the more on the bottom of the survey they will be. Agnostics and atheists read. I bet that the numbers would support me if anyone took the trouble to statistically confirm this.
Agnostics and atheists are by nature doubters, and doubters tend to be better informed about the choices out there. They don't believe everything they read. But that's because they read.
If you want to know about religion, you have to read the goddamned books. Or at least leaf through them once in a while. Or read other books about them. Otherwise, it's all hearsay, mostly devalued and distorted.
I know about Judaism because it was taught to me at home and at school, more culturally than religiously. I know about Christianity, Catholicism and Protestantism thanks to Henry VIII. I studied English literature and I'll be damned if we weren't taught every Catholic sacrament and every article of faith and that Luther nailed some paper to a Church door, in order that we could better grasp stuff like The Faerie Queene. (I fondly remember the Anabaptists, who greatly impressed me in my college days by running around naked preaching the end of the world).
The little I know about Eastern religions comes from reading The Tao of Physics, watching Kung-Fu and going to yoga and tai chi classes.
About Islam I know even less, but thanks to recent history, I know the minimum.
I'm sick and tired of lazy people who don't read. Ignorant, benighted, idiot people of all races, religions, nationalities, genders and stations in life. I particularly detest those who throw the Bible and religion around as if they had some sort of divine dispensation to feel morally superior, only because they beat their chest regularly in public. Read a freaking book so at least you know what the fuck you are talking about (I'm talking to you, Palin, and the rest of you bunch of smug intellect haters).

I'm Not Making This Up

From the catalogue of a spiritual retreat in upstate NY which shall remain nameless:
• Wild Roots, Woodslore and Wildwoods Wisdom -- WHERE'S THE BAR?
• TangoZen™: Tango with the Buddha -- ISN'T THE BUDDHA TOO FAT TO TANGO? 
• Dance of Liberation®
• Boot Camp for Goddesses® -- EUPHEMISM FOR FAT FARM?
• Overcoming Underearning® -- BY OVERPAYING THE UNDERMINER.
• Naam Yoga™ and Universal Kabbalah -- DO WE GET TO COMMUNE WITH ESTHER?
• Detox Flow® Yoga
• Yoga Tune Up®
• Purna Yoga™ 
• Satyananda Yoga®
• Embodyoga™
• Anusara Yoga®
• Jivamukti Yoga® -- IN WHICH WE MEDITATE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ® AND ™
• Breema™ -- WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?
• Tai Chi Easy™
• ChiWalking®
• ChiRunning®
• VortexHealing®  -- VOID WHERE PROHIBITED
• The Power of Personal Vibrations -- BUMMER. I THOUGHT IT SAID PERSONAL VIBRATORS
• Mindfulness Tools for Living the Full Catastrophe -- I BET THIS ONE IS FOR JEWS.
• Awakening your Authentic Soul Signature -- IS IT LIKE MY VISA SIGNATURE?
• The Art of Extreme Self-Care -- NARCISSISTS WELCOME
• Spring Ecstatic Chant -- ME AFTER SOUP DUMPLINGS AT JOE'S SHANGHAI
• A Gentle Introduction to Skydancing Tantra -- WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR ROOT BEER
• Tree Whispering™ -- WILL I BE SUED IF I DO IT ON MY OWN?
• Social Media Training -- HUH?
• FireWalking: Feel your Fear, Find your Power -- EASY FOR YOU TO SAY
• John of God -- TOO BAD CRUCIFIXION WENT OUT OF STYLE
• How to Write and Publish Spiritual Books -- AND MAKE MILLIONS DOING IT?
• Our Lady of Weight Loss EnLIGHTens -- AMEN, SISTERS
• Creating Photo Prayers -- GIVE ME A FREAKING BREAK
• Off the Mat, into the World® -- AND STILL AN ASSHOLE AT THE END OF THE CLASS
• Self-Healing through Latin Dance -- NO MAMEN 

AND MY OVERWHELMING FAVORITE: Corporate Yogis Unite!

Atheism vs Theocracy: Round 1.

I was shocked to find so many more religious Jews in Jerusalem, and in Israel in general than when I left almost 30 years ago. Oodles of orthodox and ultra-orthodox, which are not very tolerant people.
But I have news for them. I am not tolerant of them either. I could give a shit about their delusional holiness. And I'm tired of secular Jews giving them the widest berth. They don't deserve it. And this unrequited respect secular Jews have for these people is going to come back and bite us in the ass very soon, if not already.
We went to the ultra-orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem, a place in the new city where there are no holy places, just people who deem themselves holier than thou. They have massive signs on the street that say that "groups severely offend" the inhabitants of the neighborhood. Groups of what, I don't know. Humans who choose to live in the 21st century? People who dislike long sleeves and skirts in 100 degree heat?  So I was wearing short sleeves and long pants. However, the Magnificent Arepa, tired of covering up at 105 degree heat in Aqaba so as not to incur the morbid stares of Arab men, was wearing a short skirt and a t-shirt. In any case, there we go walking down Mea Shearim street, nobody saying anything. Ultra Orthodox men are forbidden to look or speak at a woman that is not covered. Most ignored us, probably used to the fact that they live in a town with lots of tourists. As we went deeper into the neighborhood, a religious woman who looked old, as they all do, suddenly announces to us that it is forbidden to walk around on the street like that. I could have easily said, okay, we'll leave, but it offended me she used the word "forbidden". Because that is not the case. It may offend her, but there is no law that states that one cannot walk on the streets of Jerusalem wearing whatever one wants. So I said in my best smartass Hebrew, "it's not forbidden, why is it forbidden?" She said that it was written in many languages that it is offensive to the people of the neighborhood. I would have left it at that, had not appeared in the horizon a secular Jewish woman, with a professorial air, wearing pants and guiding a group of tourists whose women had obviously been asked to cover up their arms and legs. This woman started butting in at no one's request saying that we were disrespecting "us". "Who is us? I'm a Jew, a secular Jew", I said, "and I can wear whatever I want because this is a free country". "No, it isn't", she informs me. A screaming match ensued in English and Hebrew, and one of her charges, a meek looking tourist, decided to chime in: "I'm not Jewish and I'm wearing a long skirt", she said. So therefore she has gained a place in Heaven? This makes me a bad Jew? WTF? I bellowed at her, "I don't care what you are. There are also secular Jews in this country and we can walk down the street however we like. Don't look at her legs, if you find them so offensive", I said to the guide. She was about to have a conniption. She threw us out of "my neighborhood" and said something about the Palestinians which was so out of context and so utterly incoherent that all I could say was "give me a fucking break".
I was not about to retreat, so we burrowed deeper into that God-forsaken, medieval hellhole. I'm waiting for the day when God appears to these people. First thing It's going to say is, "Who told you to be so utterly benighted? So contemptuous of and disrespectful to women? So ignorant and stupid? Certainly, it wasn't Me".
But now I felt really uncomfortable and claustrophobic. I feared a retaliatory mob, despite the fact that nobody else batted an eye. We finally found a way to get out of there. Again, the super-orthodox did not say a word to us, but this four letter word that starts with a c, decided to become, as we say in Spanish, more Popist than the Pope, because who knows what crap she must have been saying to those poor tourists, stuck in a one horse town full of lunatic zealots that don't respect anybody but themselves but expect us modern citizens of the world to worship at the altar of their selfrighteouness.
They can kiss my Jewish ass.

Come with me to the Casbah

The Souk in Jerusalem's Old City.

 

                                                         Incenses.

Thank God for the profane.

Easter Parade

               Great idea for an Easter bonnet. Mexicans Represent!

I'm no Bill Cunningham, but considering these were taken with the iPhone camera, not too shabby.

Tourist: "This is the greatest city in the world!"  You said it, sister.

They were also in attendance. 

Department of Really Bad P.R.

Did you hear the new one? First, it turns out that the abused Catholic children were post-pubescent, as if this makes it okay for priests to sexually molest underage children. Then it's that the abusing priests are deviant homosexuals just practicing their homosexuality (blame it on the gays). And now Father Cantalamessa's Good Friday Homily is the height of revolting sophistry. First he tries to deflect the topic he should be addressing. And I quote (bold letters are mine):

I am not speaking here of violence against children, of which unfortunately also elements of the clergy are stained; of that there is sufficient talk outside of here. I am speaking of violence to women. This is an occasion to make persons and institutions that fight against it understand that Christ is their best ally.

Huh? Wouldn't the Good Friday Homily be an excellent place to admit wrongdoing and promise change and justice? I guess not. Then comes the part that has everyone in a tizzy:

By a rare coincidence, this year our Easter falls on the same week of the Jewish Passover which is the ancestor and matrix within which it was formed. This pushes us to direct a thought to our Jewish brothers. They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms. I received in this week the letter of a Jewish friend and, with his permission, I share here a part of it. He said: "I am following with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the Church, the Pope and all the faithful by the whole world. The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism. Therefore I desire to express to you personally, to the Pope and to the whole Church my solidarity as a Jew of dialogue and of all those that in the Jewish world (and there are many) share these sentiments of brotherhood. Our Passover and yours undoubtedly have different elements, but we both live with Messianic hope that surely will reunite us in the love of our common Father. I wish you and all Catholics a Good Easter."

With all due respect, unless this anonymous, mysterious Jew is a Jew for Jesus, no self-respecting Jew would ever say anything of the sort. For Jews, the abuses of the Catholic Church are an instance of "so what else is new?". Father Cantalamessa, no doubt versed in the arts of rhetoric, is being rather elliptical by neglecting to mention that most of the collective violence against the Jews and the antisemitism he is eager to quote was instigated directly by the Catholic Church through the centuries. 
Two, nobody is collectively blaming all Catholics. People for once are blaming the people who need to be blamed, but this is a device that intends to conflate and confuse the innocent people of Catholic faith with the perpetrators and with the people in power who have aided and abetted them.
If indeed a real Jew wrote this despicable letter, which nauseatingly sides with the perpetrators and further denigrates the victims, and which to my ears sounds like an arcane rhetorical conceit, it would be nifty to know who it was so we could excommunicate him or her. Indignation should not be misdirected against the victims, or other minorities (as Church spokesmen have attempted), but squarely against the perpetrators. That a Jew is indignant over the mistreatment of the poor Catholic Church by a justly outraged world is so twisted, so wrong, so perverse, and sounds so utterly false, that my brain is becoming a pretzel just trying to articulate why this homily is so insidious, revolting and destructive.
To compare the people who have a genuine grievance against child rapists and their apologists with antisemites is beyond false. To compare the persecution and hatred of the Jews to the cries for justice in the cases of child abuse by priests is beyond reprehensible. It is obscene.
But then again, what else is new?

And I Believe in the Easter Bunny

Warning: I am about to tear the Catholic Church a new one, so if you feel that this may offend your religious sensibilities, stop reading now.

The Catholic Church is the longest lasting criminal mafia organization in existence.
It continues operating unimpeded. This latest child abuse scandal (one of many) is the tip of the iceberg of centuries of criminal behavior. Inquisitions, persecutions, expulsions, crusades, plunder, violence, graft, corruption, slavery, extortion, (remember the selling of indulgences that caused Luther to start the Reformation?), siding with evil in recent history (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco). The catalog of evils is endless.
In the United States, lay child molesters are ostracized and persecuted even after they've done time in jail, but priests, with the approval and abetting of the Vatican, are allowed to continue their duties unmolested in other parishes. All the Church cares about is covering up scandal. This is the fallacy of religion, that somehow clergy people are more pure or that the rules that apply to everyone do not apply to them because they have a closer relationship to God (as if). In fact, they take advantage of the trust of the faithful and abuse their power over them. This is evil. This is how organized religion, and particularly the Catholic Church, the most powerful and richest religious organization in the world, has literally gotten away with murder for centuries. The harm, violence, poverty, murder, enmity and catastrophe it has caused is in plain view in the history books. 
Contrition, repentance and forgiveness, boy do they come in handy when you are caught committing unspeakable acts against innocents, don't they? The sheer gall of using humane concepts preached by Jesus to get away with murder. But it won't do. If your child is abused, do you want the rapist to repent and ask for forgiveness with a pat on the hand, or do you want him to face justice? Priests and nuns and any other clergy of any other religion who engage in what constitutes criminal behavior in civil society need to be brought to justice in this world, not the next.
Church officials seem to think that expressing remorse is more than enough. In the case of the priest who molested deaf boys in Milwaukee, his remorse wasn't very convincing. He made all sorts of rationalizations and justifications for his indefensible behavior (accusing the kids of being homosexuals, thinking that the kids were enjoying it because they were allowing it). These people live in a bubble of supposed sanctity that totally warps their moral and ethical instincts. And with all due respect, the parents who put their children in the care of these monsters should by now, know better. It is amazing to me, reading and hearing from Catholics everywhere that there is pervasive, day to day knowledge of abusive priests and nuns, not always sexual, but always damaging, yet everybody looks the other way, in particular this awful Pope. Why are people willing to give such appalling leeway to religious people?
Have you read about the Catholic Church in Ireland? It's a catalog of terror. When I read Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes I was taken aback by the way he portrayed the supposedly charitable societies that humiliated and punished the poor with unusual fervor, even glee. That a modern country could tolerate such blatant mistreatment and abuse for so long is amazing to me. And now the Pope is telling the Irish 'tis their problem. I hope that at last their eyes will finally open. For those with strong constitutions, I recommend the harrowing movie The Magdalene Sisters, directed by Irish actor Peter Mullan. Unbelievable injustice and cruelty.  And these convents were closed only relatively recently.
There may be some orders that do good here and there but the institution of the Church is rotten from the top. It also seems to be utterly out of touch with current reality. In our modern age it doesn't start wars and crusades anymore, but the evil it does is no less harmful to millions of people, like their campaign against the distribution of condoms in Africa to stop the spread of AIDS, and their intransigent stance against contraception. 
The ascendancy of this Pope illustrates just how out of touch the Vatican is with the reality of the world today. In Europe and America nobody goes to church anymore. Traditionally Catholic countries like Italy and Spain, and now Ireland, have had enough of Church abuse. The majority of the faithful now live in less developed countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Instead of choosing someone with Third World credentials, someone who could excite people back into a Church more engaged with the real problems of the world, they pick a cerebral German former Hitler Youth who obsesses about ancient Church tenets and seems indifferent to human suffering. They deserve everything they got coming.  As a Jew (and I do blame most of the severe problems of the Jewish people since 1 A.D. on Christianity) I have to say, that watching the Vatican squirm gives me endless pleasure. I have always loathed the Catholic Church. And I'm lucky to live in a secular world in which I don't get to be burned at the stake for saying it. 
Is ending celibate vows the answer? I don't think so. Some priests may marry women, but what about the gay priests? Are they going to marry women too? This opens a whole fresh can of worms. So no. I doubt the abuse of power one way or another will ever stop. This abuse of power is not exclusive to the Catholic Church. It is part of the human condition, since organized religion of any kind is the greatest racket ever invented by man and has been a refuge for conmen since time immemorial. The only inoculation against it is to have strong safeguards in the separation between Church and State. Religion does the most harm when it is chums with political power. This is why it ran rampant in Ireland. And in countries like Mexico, where it exploited people until enlightened leaders like Benito Juárez all the way back in the 1850's said basta and separated church and state, giving rise to a nation with secular laws.
I don't have a beef with personal faith. Knock yourselves out believing in whatever gives you comfort. But be aware that there are those who seek to take advantage of your faith because to them, and in opposition to everything you believe in, it makes you vulnerable, not stronger.

Where evil thrives unrestrained

Headline in the front page of the New York Times:

Vatican Declined to Defrock Priest Who Abused Deaf Boys

Looking for pure human evil? Check the Vatican.

Texas can kiss my ass

Read this article on the Christian right trying to influence the Texas Board of Education, the most influential in the country, and be ready to tear your hair out.
A fundamentalist Christian dentist and an insurance salesman are deciding the kind of changes that will get put into textbooks in this increasingly idiotic country. And the spineless publishers just want to make it on the lists of the boards of ed, because there is nothing more sacred to them than business. So they comply.

It turns out that this is a Christian nation founded on Biblical values. Who knew? 
Forgive my ignorance, but I thought it was a secular nation, founded on humanistic and enlightenment values, with a solid separation of church and state, which is absolutely essential to the wellbeing of democracy and the mental health of the citizenry.
But what do I know? I only came here thinking that it was a forward looking, progress embracing democracy, not a theocracy waiting to happen.
We are behind in science, we are behind in learning, but we are way ahead in reality shows and human abominations like Sarah Palin; soon we will all be ruled by the American Taliban, because of the levels of bureaucratic and political absurdity we tolerate. And because, let's face it, liberals don't know how to put up a fight. They are too busy worrying about who feels offended (something the other camp is completely cavalier about).
These people will not be happy unless they achieve total mind control (as fundamentalist religion is wont to do. It is nothing but fascism).
Stop being respectful of religious people who are not respectful of you.
Stop thinking they have some sort of dispensation to run over your basic rights and to impose their stupid ideas on your children. Their faith is worthless to anyone but them. But their politicking is extremely dangerous.
Don't come whining to me when you open an American textbook and it says the world was created in 7 days and you wake up one morning and you are living in Iran.

Nothing is Sacred

That goes for you, Ireland, where a blasphemy law goes into effect, punishing blasphemous people with a fine of 25,000 euros.

The Defamation Act 2009 makes blasphemy a crime punishable by a €25,000 fine... Blasphemy is defined as “matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion” with safeguards to make it harder to prosecute.

This sounds to me like Ireland is designing this cowardly law in the false hope that it will discourage religious fanatical idiots from blowing it up if someone dares criticize their beliefs. Simply substitute the words Islamic fundamentalist for the word religion in the text and voilá. What's a substantial number of religious, intolerant assholes? How many is substantial? Who decides what's grossly abusive? Some people get bent out of shape by a cartoon. Who is to judge?

...it is wrong in principle for a modern democratic republic to have any type of blasphemy law. Theological thought-crimes belong in the past. Religious and nonreligious people alike should be protected from harm and incitement to harm, but religious and nonreligious ideas alike should be open to any criticism. That is how human knowledge progresses. Blasphemy laws discriminate against nonreligious citizens, by protecting the fundamental beliefs of religious citizens only.
This law also has serious international impacts. Irish citizens could face blasphemy charges elsewhere under the European Arrest Warrant. Also, Islamic States are lobbying at the UN to make defamation of religion a crime internationally.

This is rich. Non-Islamic states should vote in the UN to make Islamic fundamentalism punishable by law. It is certainly more deadly than blasphemy.
The moment we allow these religious savages to curtail our freedom of expression, we are allowing them to drag us back to the stone age with them. I will not live in a world of cavemen. 
Absolutely nothing anybody can say about religion is blasphemous. It may be offensive, disrespectful and in bad taste, but it does not have an extra charge of sin only because it is directed towards God or religious symbols or figures.  They may be sacred to some, but as long as they are not sacred to all, there is no blasphemy. Unbelievers cannot be expected to behave and think as if we believed. Please stop trying to foist your ridiculous notions on us and the rest of the civilized world.
If my thinking about religion offends someone, too bad. Lighten up. Their intolerant, irrational, insane religious opinions offend me equally, but I tolerate them because I have no right not to. 
Reasonable, commonsensical people need to be less afraid of voicing their concerns about the abusive, coercive, fearmongering tactics of religious leaders of all persuasions. Enough with treating religious abuse with kid gloves.

Who are Jew?

Interesting article about a case in Britain of a Jewish parochial school who denied admission to a Jewish kid, the son of a Jewish father and a converted mother, because the school did not accept the mother's conversion. This conversion was done in a progressive synagogue as opposed to an Orthodox one. Someone decided this was not kosher. This is wrong.
This woman went through a conversion in order to marry her Jewish husband. This conversion happened in a legitimate synagogue, albeit not an Orthodox one. The conversion should be accepted by the school. End of story.
The refusal to accept this woman's legitimate conversion has nothing to do with religion or faith and everything to do with politics and the power trip that the Orthodox wield around the world. They get away with it because nobody is willing to stop them. Secular Jews think, wrongly, that the Orthodox are needed to preserve Judaism. The only way to preserve Judaism is to be in touch with your roots and your culture, not to expect others to do it for you. There is no reason, religious, legal, moral, historical, or otherwise for the Orthodox to have the sole right to determine who is a Jew and who isn't. Theirs is an interpretation of law and custom among many others equally valid.
Now, this family took the school to civil court on the grounds of discrimination. WELL DONE. However, this has opened a very interesting can of worms with enormous ramifications for Jewish life in the diaspora. The court has ruled that the school discriminated the boy on the basis of ethnicity, which is illegal in Britain. The case affects other religions as well, but since Judaism is the only religion that claims matrilineal descent as proof of Judaism, the implications for Jews are enormous. The British court neglected to take into account, or willfully ignored, (which would be very troubling) this Jewish religious exceptionalism and ruled that defining religion on the base of ethnicity is discriminatory.
Well, this is what Judaism does, and it has always been a problem in our relationship with non-Jews. People ask me, so are Jews a religion or are we a race? If Jewish law says that a Jew is a person born of a Jewish woman, then we are a race. This is why Judaism is not a proselytizing religion. We are not actively looking for converts. We can only expand demographically by having children inside the faith. "Be fruitful and multiply", says God in the Bible (this is why the Orthodox practice no birth control and have oodles of children). However, if someone, for reasons of love or conviction wants to join the tribe, they may do so, after converting. Someone must have noticed early that it would be impossible to restrict our involvement with the rest of humanity so drastically and decided to allow for conversion.
Gentiles don't understand a religion that is also an ethnic group or race. They believe it is discriminatory and racist. It's problematic but it's what makes Jews, Jews; unless we all decide to change the law and agree that a Jew is simply someone who wants to profess our faith, regardless of their ethnic origin. This would change what we've been for over 5000 years and could technically render me (a fervent atheist) not a Jew, and every single hardcore evangelical Christian, a Jew (this by the way, is the spurious premise of Jews for Jesus).

Orthodox Jews, of course, sympathize with the school, saying that observance is no test of Jewishness, and that all that matters is whether one’s mother is Jewish. So little does observance matter, in fact, that “having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish,” Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, chairman of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue, said recently.

That's me, in a nutshell. I agree with that. This is why it is perfectly possible to be a Jew and an atheist at the same time. It's not about faith but about genealogy, history, and culture.
Jewish orthodoxy is not the only legitimate game in town anymore. There are different congregations which have adapted Jewish beliefs and traditions to modern life. They are no less legitimate than orthodoxy. Secular Jews, who are always way too tolerant of the tyrannical designs of the Orthodox, should reject their strongarming tactics.
I remember when the Ethiopian Jews arrived in Israel, and the Orthodox were demanding conversions of them. The gall. I know people who went to school with me and live fully committed Jewish lives, and have Jewish kids of their own, that would not be accepted as Jews by the Orthodox simply because their mothers converted in non-orthodox synagogues. This is unacceptable.

God needs a Shrink

I got a concerned report by someone who saw people on TV carrying a sign that read "God hates Jews". I kind of shrugged it off. So what else is new? After like 2 minutes of internet research, it turns out that it was members of the pesky Phelps family, and their cultlike Westboro Baptist Church. It's funny to me that these people seem to know exactly who God hates. According to them, He hates America, the Gays and now the Jews (and the ever popular Fag Nazi Jews). I loath to make more publicity for this retarded extended family from Topeka, but the opportunity to talk about God's hatreds is too rich to waste.
My first reaction upon hearing the claim about God hating Jews was, in a sense it's true. Because if He didn't, He wouldn't have made it so difficult to be one. He would not have been manifesting gross indifference to the persecution of Jews throughout history, to say the very least. The Jewish God is an angry parent. He is like a Jewish mother gone monster. There is no end to the threats and punishments and do this and do that, and don't eat this and eat that. Very controlling, autocratic, volatile, moody and prone to anger. Not much of a sense of humor, and not very warm, which is strange, for a Jew.
By the time Christianity came around, God supposedly became the God of love, of turning the other cheek, etc. That's an improvement until you consider that He was unduly harsh with His only son, allowing that poor guy to be tortured and crucified just to prove a petty point about sin. Not much love there. (And don't get me started on what this did to the Jews...) He is more of an abusive parent (with great P.R., though).
I will not go into the Muslim God for fear of being decapitated or blown to smithereens by some oversensitive fundamentalist. But you get my drift. The 3 Gods of the main religions are the same guy. And He needs a shrink. He needs to chill out.
I have a problem with the Judeo-Christian God because of the concept of free will. Giving man free will was very big of Him, but it didn't quite work out, did it? If you are going to give man free will, you gotta stick around to deal with the consequences; not do it and play dumb for the rest of human history. That's not nice. That's rather irresponsible and callous.
If God is so great, why didn't he make us all cool artists and nice people and fair and just and capable of living together in harmony and respecting our planet, etc, etc?
I think that the problem with the monotheistic Gods is that humans give God an element of power and control He really isn't interested in. We anthropomorphize It, when we should not even be claiming that we can ever know It.
God is only interested in creation and destruction. It does that automatically, through nature. It has no moral essence. It creates things of beauty (like the natural kingdom) and destroys them, because that's how It works. If anything, God is life, It is not law.
I can understand this kind of God better than the neurotic one we insist on worshiping and speaking for, as if some of us really knew It.
Always beware of people who claim to know God and what He thinks. They are really bad news.

ps: does this little theological disquisition turn me from an atheist to a pantheist? Hmmm...

Department of Unfathomable Idiocy

I got some sort of moronic prophecy yesterday via email (that's how we get them nowadays, together with asinine chain letters and Nigerian scams) in which, supposedly, the biblical book of Ezekiah foresees the destruction of Israel by a "black prince".
Now, some enterprising religious imbecile put it upon himself to find the Hebrew letters that spell Obama scattered through the text, totally at random. You can do the same and find the letters for "Burger King" or "Borscht" or "Mogo in the Gogogo" or whatever combination you desire. This is nothing but the most insidious, retarded, irresponsible fear and hate mongering.
Jews should know better than to do these kinds of things. For those with a short memory, let me remind you that it is precisely this kind of defamatory drivel that fanned antisemitism for centuries. Shame on you.
And why? Because Obama is demanding a freeze on settlements? Or because he's Black and has an Arab middle name? Or because it is always good business to keep the gullible pissing in their pants?
What angers me most is that the very selfsame Jews who consider the Bible sacred and untouchable and literal, are the ones who are quick to turn it into a cheap source of supersitious mumbo jumbo.
Beware of the holier than thou: they are the greatest scammers on Earth.
I have a picture of this thing, but I will not post it because that would defeat the purpose. This stuff should not be scattered around. It should be condemned and abhorred, if only for how transparently manipulative, evil and stupid it is.

A Harpe un a Shande

As I said: pious, personal relationships with God are not a guarantee of human decency.
That is true of all religions.
What are rabbis doing, of all people, laundering corruption money for a fee in Jersey?
WTF?
Many "pious" people use religion as a con. The aura of sanctity makes it easier for them to be immoral, because most people still believe that religion is an immediate and reliable indicator of virtue.
It is not.
It's like suicide bombers that dress like pregnant women. Nobody would suspect a pregnant woman of carrying a bomb. Same goes for these bozos. They reason that nobody would suspect a rabbi from laundering money.
Well, I would and I do. Just as I suspect televangelists from conning people and stealing money in the name of the Lord.

One can be moral and decent and upstanding without religion.
The more people realize this fact, the better.

Today, I heard a fascinating interview with Sacha Baron Cohen on NPR (thanks Joshua!) about how he does what he does. He was saying that in that remarkable scene in Borat at a fundamentalist church where they were trying to save him, they were crowding him and shaking his arms to make it look like he was in trance and instructing him to speak in tongues.

Religious con artists know that "there's a sucker born every minute".