Not playing football is not a sport.
Not collecting stamps is not a hobby.
Abstinence is not a sexual position.
Anarchy is not a form of government.
Not owning a gun does not mean you trample of the Second Amendment.
We’re all born naked and atheist, and then we slowly get indoctrinated to become something else. The word for atheism only exists because religion has become so prevalent and powerful over the ages, that non-religion is the minority.
Warning and Disclaimer: If you are religious, and are easily offended by criticism of your religion, you should probably stop reading now and move on. I am angry and this post will reflect some of that.
I came across the post below on Facebook. I don’t know the poster, and I don’t know any but one of the commenters. So I am an unrelated observer, and I am outraged. Here is the post:
Here is the transcript:
Yesterday, I received terrible news. Two of my twin girls students went hiking with there [sic] Mom and other sisters in Julian at a 101 degrees [sic] in the local mountains. XXX and YYY twin girls got dehydrated and they were weak and XXX fainted. They did not carry enough water and it was a 45 minute hike back for help. A good Samaritan carried XXX down the Mtn. She was in the hospital with severe heat stroke and went into a coma. Our XXX passed away yesterday. My sweet daughter in Christ you are in great hands now! We will miss you! God Bless You – Until we meet again. Always in my heart.
I cannot tell if the person who posted this is the father, or a teacher, or a minister. It is a terrible tragedy, and I thought it was tacky to be posting this on Facebook. What is one supposed to say to that? Given the tragic content, their friends did a pretty good job expressing their sorrow, pain and overall condolences.
If I were a friend, I would not know what to say to this, so I’d probably be quiet. But I am not a friend, just a casual bystander. Therefore, my comments are below the comments I lifted from the post.
Taking small children hiking in the mountains at 101 degrees is idiotic. Not bringing enough water shows added stupidity. Going 45 minutes out under those conditions is reckless. These girls didn’t just pass out all of a sudden. I am sure they showed signs of fatigue long before and complained, giving the parent a chance to turn around. The whole event is RECKLESS CHILD ENDANGERMENT. And it didn’t just end in endangerment. A child was killed by reckless parental negligence.
I can see that none of the Facebook friends wanted to say that, but I am sure some of them thought it before they posted their condolences.
But what’s worst, to me, beyond the incredible tastelessness of the original poster putting this on Facebook and thus exposing the parent’s recklessness, is his lame excuse at the end that is supposed to make it tolerable or acceptable:
My sweet daughter in Christ you are in great hands now! We will miss you! God Bless You – Until we meet again.
No, the little girl is not in great hands now.
Her life was recklessly thrown away by a stupid and uninformed parent who took incalculable risks with the lives of her children. “May God bless her and her family” isn’t going to bring her back. If God had blessed this family, he would have given the mother more common sense. Giving prayers to this family is also not bringing the little girl back. Somebody ought to give a serious talking to this family. The mother needs counseling, or perhaps belongs in jail, since she is not any better than vaccine deniers, or those cults that deny their members medical care in case of illness.
My problem with religion is that it gives perpetrators excuses for their lack of responsibility and duty. It gives bystanders cause for rationalization that God has somehow caused this to happen so he can now “wrap his tender hands around this girl and her family.” Religion somehow makes all this easier to take.
I just hope that after this public post, Child Protective Services initiates a serious investigation into this family.
Ken Ham built the Ark Encounter, a Christian theme park. It is scheduled to open next month.
It cost tens of millions of dollars to build a “life-sized” replica of Noah’s ark.
I wonder how Noah, who was reportedly over 500 years old, with his sons, would have built such a thing with Bronze Age tools. He didn’t have access to cranes, and trucks, and roads to haul in lumber, and steel scaffoldings, and modern steel nuts and bolts and braces.
But I have to admit, it would be a cool thing to see.
Here is one demented preacher that gets to speak from a podium. I have a very hard time believing that people can sit in his congregation and listen to this sick man and still believe there is a god.
Calling gay people pedophiles from a religious pulpit is ironic. Last I heard, it’s Catholic priests, youth pastors all over the country and fundamentalist Mormons, who are getting headlines for systematically violating children. Show me one headline where a gay person touched a child.
Here is his message:
“If we lived in a righteous government, they should round them all up and put them up against a firing wall, and blow their brains out,” Jimenez said in the sermon.
San Brower is a private investigator who took on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or FLDS, as it is commonly referred to, and gradually, over years of painstaking work, exposed it and its leader and “prophet,” Warren Jeffs, as an organized criminal enterprise of massive proportions.
Prophet’s Prey is his chilling exposé of the Fundamentalist Mormon religion and the endless, brutal crimes perpetrated by the “leadership” all in the name of God.
The FLDS is acult with its headquarters in Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah, two neighboring towns in a remote and isolated strip of the country, bordered by the Grand Canyon to the south and cliffs to the north. Pretty much all the people who live there are part of the cult.
The Mormon religion was founded by Joseph Smith in 1820. In my opinion, Smith was a pedophile and a con man. He started a religion to create a lifestyle for himself. When he eventually was murdered, Brigham Young, another autocratic child abuser and power-grabbing dictator built up the Mormon church. One of the tenets of the religion was polygamy. When the practice started becoming unpopular in the United States about 100 years ago, the “mainstream” Mormons renounced polygamy.
Some of the faithful didn’t like that, and eventually split off to start the FLDS. It exists to this day.
The flock is not allowed to listen to the radio, watch TV or movies, read books, listen to music or get an education. Most children stop school at the elementary level. The people have lived in this environment their entire lives and are completely brainwashed about what the “real world” is like. They think they are God’s chosen people, and their leader is the prophet who speaks God’s will. Everyone is in on it. The doctors and nurses in the hospital. The judges. The police. The mayor. The bishop. The contractors. The health inspectors. The teachers. You can’t escape the reach of the church leadership, and their word, their will, is God’s word and will. People blindly follow orders, whether the orders are legal or not.
When God wants the prophet to be “sealed” to a 12-year-old girl in marriage, then the father of that child has no choice but give up his daughter. Systematic child abuse, rape of boys as young as five to eight years old in the guise of God’s will, and getting underage girls as young as 12 and 13 pregnant by the dozens is apparently commonplace and normal in that environment.
A recently married and newly pregnant Veda Keate, the thirteen-year-old daughter of convicted child molester Allen Keate. Shortly after Allen gave Veda in marriage to Warren, he took an underage bride of his own. He is serving thirty-three years in Huntsville State Prison in Texas.
— Brower, Sam (2011-08-01). Prophet’s Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (p. 311). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Ora Bonnie Steed posing with underage sister wife Veda Keate. Warren wrote that both conceived their babies during the same “heavenly session” with him. Veda also appeared in a photo in a National Geographic cover story on the FLDS, along with her daughter Serena. The caption in the magazine identified them only as two of the children taken in the raid on the YFZ Ranch.
— Brower, Sam (2011-08-01). Prophet’s Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (p. 311). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
“Heavenly session” is what the man of God and FLDS leader calls group sex with multiple underage girls at the same time – because somehow that helps the salvation of the world. The entire religion buys into this.
One girl, who eventually escaped, tells her story of growing up in a house with 20 bedrooms and 16 bathrooms with her father, his six wives and 52 children. This seems normal to them. Yet, we all know that this kind of lifestyle is not supportable. Most American’s have trouble supporting a family of four or five people with two incomes. How does a man support six wives and 52 children?
By having five of the wives apply for welfare as single mothers with the State of Arizona or Utah, or both. By sending boys as young as 11 off to work on construction sites as slave laborers. By sucking as much money as possible out of the system, out of our taxes and welfare money. They call it “bleeding the beast” and justify it since they are God’s chosen people.
Prophet’s Prey is a shocking book that provides a view into what almost seems like an alternate universe. It is astonishing that these things can be going on right now, in our time, with very little interference from law enforcement of any kind. After reading Prophet’s Prey, you will never think about the Mormon religion the same way again.
The “mainstream” Mormons are distancing themselves from the Fundamentalists. I don’t buy it. It’s the same messed-up cult, just a different, more drastic flavor of it.
But read about it yourself, and be your own judge. Prophet’s Prey is a must-read book for any educated and responsible American.
Other articles and reviews I wrote related to Mormonism:
Play Review: The Book of Mormon
Romney Going Psycho about Mormonism
Institutional Lies and Deception of Mormonism
Mormon Doctrine on Race (White and Black)
Mormons Baptize Jews Posthumously
Book Review: Wife No. 19 – by Ann Eliza Young
Park Romney’s Book and Mitt Romney’s Waffling
Book Review: An American Fraud – by Kate Burningham
On December 2, 2015, 14 people were killed and another 22 seriously injured in a violent attack in San Bernardino by Islamic terrorists.
Statistically, every other day a child is shot and killed in the U.S. from gun violence.
Over the last three months and ten days, that’s 14 people dead from Islamic terrorism and about 50 children (I am not counting adults here) from “run of the mill” domestic shootings and accidents.
Which is the bigger threat and danger to Americans? And which does the media remind us about every day?
There you have it. I said “Islamic terrorism” because there is something very wrong with a religion that incites people to mass-kill innocent others and stone apostates and infidels. Let’s not forget, however, that Christians did just that when they burned witches and tortured heretics.
But the real threat to Americans and to dying in America as an innocent is by automobile accidents (about 30,000 a year) and domestic gun violence (another 30,000 a year, about half of which are suicides) vs. a couple of dozen due to Muslim nutcases.
That is what occurred to me on this Easter Sunday morning.
A musical not for the faint of heart, or anyone subscribing to any religion at all. If you are religious, you are likely to be offended by The Book of Mormon.
The story follows two Mormon missionaries to Uganda where they are assigned to share their scriptures with the inhabitants of a village. The locals in Africa, of course, have their own problems, including AIDS, oppression and hunger. Stories in a book about an American farmer two hundred years ago in upstate New York who received the word of God on golden plates do not interest them much, or appear relevant at all.
The Book of Mormon is a religious satire, brutal to Mormonism, but surely offensive to any religion. If you thought that the image of the “missionary position” is compromising, you don’t know what is expecting you. While some of the songs are mild and funny, others are bursting with severe verbal obscenity and extreme graphic imagery of sexuality, wrapped into catchy music and colorful stage play.
Book, lyrics and music are by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone, the creators of the animated comedy South Park. Lopez was a co-composer and co-lyricist for Avenue Q, another musical I enjoyed very much.
The Book of Mormon does not pull any punches. As an atheist, I thought it was hilarious and brutal at the same time. It was good, funny entertainment. For my religious friends, I would recommend skipping it. I can’t see how they are going to enjoy the musical, with the continuous barrage of off-color, crass humor and ridicule of the God concept, delivered by exposing the peculiarities of Mormonism.
Thanks for the tickets, Devin!
Often, when arguing with a creationist (or as I might call them more aptly, evolution-denier) I find that while the knowledge is there and obvious, I don’t have all the answers quite readily available without research. This topic is not part of my special expertise. So here I found a good summary of questions from creationists, answered by a scientist with a lot of references that help with the most common questions. It’s a good reference post.
Religion is destroying the values of our world society and cultural and economic progress. Here is a journey through 2015 by Jeffrey Tayler to this effect, with dozens of examples of the aberrational thought processes we have gotten used to and come to accept as reality.
Islam is getting the crown in 2015 for its homicidal ravages in Syria and Iraq, its jihadist pursuits in other countries (Paris, San Bernardino to just name the most obvious ones), and various human rights transgressions all over the world, condemning atheist bloggers to death in courts of law (Saudi Arabia), and mutilating the genitalia of young girls. Christianity is taking second place, with at least one batshit crazy anti-abortion activist mowing down people, and the seemingly ascending rhetoric in our conservative corners to “bring back biblical values:”
Franklin Graham, son of gay-marriage denouncer Reverend Billy Graham, abandoned the Republican party, fed up with its funding of Planned Parenthood, and demanded Christian candidates who support “biblical values.” Did he have in mind those Leviticus- and Deuteronomy-sanctioned values that condone stoning your daughter for not being a virgin on her wedding night and forcing women to marry their rapists, as well as genocide and slavery? Or was he referring to New Testament values, which endorse hating one’s parents (as required for salvation by Jesus), chopping off hands, and eternal punishment for trivial offenses?
I think our society would be much better off without Bronze-age value systems completely out of touch with modern society (Christianity) and middle-age barbarism (Islam). Of course, there were more recent attempts of resurrecting Christianity right here in the United States (Mormonism). I have written extensively about Mormonism in these pages. You can search for the term and find those posts.
Looks like the San Bernardino shooting is another incident of Islamic Terrorism on United States soil.
Sorry to all the 99.9 percent “good” Muslims. They too have a responsibility. It sure appears as if their religion and their God consistently motivated the believers to kill innocent people to further the control of the religion over its people. Islam appears to me to be a very violent and deadly religion.
Christianity was just like that, but mostly between the years 800 through 1600, at its height during the crusades. It kind of got over this tendency, except in the United States where there are still a few Christians who think it’s a good thing to kill providers of certain medical services in the name of their God. But Christian terrorism is nowadays fairly small.
Muslims, however, should clean up their ranks and straighten out their religion. This is not working very well for them right now. Their extremist arm is obviously trying to pull the world into WW III. Nothing would suit them more than everyone dead, and the caliphate flourishing, keeping women dumb and enslaved, keeping the elite rich, and making peasants of everyone else. Let’s all go back to the year 1200.
There can be no peace until they renounce their Rabbit God and accept our Duck God!
A Saudi man was sentenced to death basically for being an atheist. The link below for The Guardian provides more detail.
The religious police first detained Fayadh in August 2013 after receiving a complaint that he was cursing against Allah and the prophet Muhammad, insulting Saudi Arabia and distributing a book of his poems that promoted atheism. Fayadh said the complaint arose from a personal dispute with another artist during a discussion about contemporary art in a cafe in Abha.
Here is a regime that is extremely rich due to the oil bonanza in the Middle East. The United States supports this repressive (almost medieval) regime. Here is the link to the Saudi embassy web site.
What kind of country must kill those that don’t subscribe to its official religion? Christian countries did this for centuries. Muslim countries have always done it and are still doing it now.
And we stand by and watch and sell them F-35 fighter planes.
Here is the first page, the two introductory paragraphs, of The End of Faith by Sam Harris.
THE young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pockets are filled with nails, ball bearings, and rat poison. The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city. The young man takes his seat beside a middle-aged couple. He will wait for the bus to reach its next stop. The couple at his side appears to be shopping for a new refrigerator. The woman has decided on a model, but her husband worries that it will be too expensive. He indicates another one in a brochure that lies open on her lap. The next stop comes into view. The bus doors swing. The woman observes that the model her husband has selected will not fit in the space underneath their cabinets. New passengers have taken the last remaining seats and begun gathering in the aisle. The bus is now full. The young man smiles. With the press of a button he destroys himself, the couple at his side, and twenty others on the bus. The nails, ball bearings, and rat poison ensure further casualties on the street and in the surrounding cars. All has gone according to plan.
The young man’s parents soon learn of his fate. Although saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment. They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory. The neighbors find the event a great cause for celebration and honor the young man’s parents by giving them gifts of food and money. These are the facts. This is all we know for certain about the young man. Is there anything else that we can infer about him on the basis of his behavior? Was he popular in school? Was he rich or was he poor? Was he of low or high intelligence? His actions leave no clue at all. Did he have a college education? Did he have a bright future as a mechanical engineer? His behavior is simply mute on questions of this sort, and hundreds like them. Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy— you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy— to guess the young man’s religion?
— Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Over six years ago I reviewed the book by Sam Harris titled The End of Faith.
More relevant today than ever, it is a searing indictment of all religions and how they counteract progress, science and the good and peace in our modern societies. The Muslim religion is lately singled out as one of the strongest culprits. It’s the one religion that somehow gets teenagers to put on suicide belts and blow themselves up in public places. It’s the one religion that does pseudo-medieval reality shows showing YouTube videos of choreographed beheadings. It’s the one that’s associated with atrocities today.
That was not always true. Christianity had its share of killing, genocide, persecution and corruption on a gargantuan scale over the centuries. Fortunately Christians stopped committing atrocities on a large scale around the 1600s or so (for the most part).
Muslims never stopped, and they continue to commit them now, with the help of social media, automatic weapons, and shipments of oil. So, yes, the “good Muslims” are not happy with this, and I understand them. Yet, without a doubt, the fundamental tenets of Islam foment the insanity we are witnessing today.
I invite you to read The End of Faith to educate yourself about all the adverse effects of religion in general and Islam in particular.
