I mean, just look at this utterly delusional garbage:

Even though I have a strong background in science and firmly believe in the scientific method and the scientific tradition, I am a professional astrologer. Yup. Don’t ask me why it works; it just does, and I have studied and used the ancient art to good effect throughout my life. I make no apology for my interest, so if you hate astrology, please scroll on by.

‘professional astrologist’, haha, what a great euphemism for ‘con man or idiot’.

He later clarifies that he considers himself a professional but doesn’t charge in the comments. Which is… an odd definition of professional, but hey, that word has no business within a mile of astrology. Or any other form of religious hokum, for that matter.

I mean, seriously:

You will likely feel like you’re making a fresh start emotionally as the New Moon (16 degrees 5 minutes in Capricorn), which symbolizes your emotional self, is separating from the Sun (13 degrees 53 minutes in Capricorn), which is your source of creative energy. The only potential problem is that you may have trouble choosing in which direction to go, as the ideas and possibilities are likely to seem somewhat overwhelming. Fortunately, however, the Moon and Sun tend to be grounded and practical in Capricorn.

*snort* hahahaha… oh priceless. Seriously priceless. The relative position of the Moon and the Sun to an IMAGINARY SHAPE IN THE SKY will affect your brain. Somehow.

It’s maaaaaaaaaaagic.

Rayne pops up in comments there defending both the author’s smug dismissal of reality and critics based in reality. Funny how I couldn’t get a response from her for weeks, hell, months on FDL’s misuse of my content, but she can appear as if by magic when some asshat clown starts telling people that imaginary mystical forces will change their brain chemistry or alter their fate. Somehow.

I can’t get so much as an answer on my intellectual property, let alone a response to documented moderator abuse, but astrology needs defending? Quick, someone flick the Rayne-signal.

Priceless.

Next up, an FDL community blog series on why you should skip vaccinating your kids in favor of blood-letting.

I mean, is there ANY limit to what people can post there?

So long as they don’t personally annoy an anonymous moderator, I mean.

Legally a messy situation, but policy wise, a real step forward.

Naturally, being the enemies of sound policy, the Obama Administration has appealed to the 9th Circuit, and their appeal is a humdinger too. Instead of merely arguing over the technical merits of Phillips’ worldwide injunction, they mounted a spirited defense of the constitutionality of DADT, an inherently discriminatory policy that turns gay Americans into second-class citizens:

What is very troubling, however, is that the Administration, by and through the DOJ never – never – indicates that it considers DADT to be unconstitutional on its face. Every objection by team Obama is in favor simply of study and legislative repeal; and, in fact, they doggedly protect the constitutionality of DADT. There is a HUGE difference between the two concepts of saying it is simply something that should be fixed by Congress (increasingly unlikely, it should be added, in light of the massive gains conservative Republicans are poised to make) and saying the Administration fully believes the policy unconstitutional and invidiously discriminatory (the position Obama blatantly refuses to make).

It should also be noted that a refusal to acknowledge the fundamental constitutionally discriminatory nature of DADT is also entirely consistent with the recent history of Obama Administration conduct and statements on the issue. Whether it be Obama himself, official spokesman Robert Gibbs or Valerie Jarrett, every time the direct question on constitutionality of DADT is raised, it is deflected with a flimsy response framed in terms of Congressional repeal. At this point, you have to wonder if Barack Obama and his Administration even consider the blatant discrimination of DADT to be of a Constitutional level at all; the evidence certainly is lacking of any such commitment.

This comes a week after top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett referred to being gay as a ‘lifestyle choice’… while discussing the tragic suicide of a bullied teenager no less.

Keep in mind that President Obama is a steadfast opponent of equality for gay Americans in other arenas as well, consistently opposing gay marriage on religious grounds:

In his bestseller, The Audacity of Hope, Obama, now a U.S. senator, explains his support for civil unions, again mentioning religion and noting the strategic problems that the push for gay marriage poses:

For many practicing Christians, the inability to compromise may apply to gay marriage. I find such a position troublesome, particularly in a society in which Christian men and women have been known to engage in adultery or other violations of their faith without civil penalty. I believe that American society can choose to carve out a special place for the union of a man and a woman as the unit of child rearing most common to every culture. I am not willing to have the state deny American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights no such basic matters as hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love are of the same sex–nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount. …The heightened focus on marriage is a distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination and gays and lesbians. (pp. 222-3)

Well, since running for higher office, anyway. When he was a younger man, and a less ambitious politician, he at least claimed to hold diametrically opposed views, favoring gay marriage.

Let’s call this what it is. If President Obama opposes equal rights for gays and lesbians because of his religious delusions, then he is a bigot and a closet theocrat. If he’s opposing their equal rights out of mere political expediency, then he is a hypocrite, a liar and a coward, giving comfort to bigots.

Either way, he’s a disgusting excuse for a public figure.

It is preposterous beyond words to sit back and allow him to pass himself off as some sort of moderate while he uses religious fanaticism to publicly justify depriving gay Americans of their equal rights, and refuses to take simple actions entirely at his discretion to stop persecution of American citizens based on their sexual orientation. It is sycophantic beyond belief to point at the minority party in the Senate and act as if it was their nefarious schemes that prevented Obama from stopping DADT, or somehow forced him to make bigoted statements about gay marriage based on his hokey sky-god religion. Obama got into this mess on his own, by reversing his earlier position and by pushing delay after delay instead of acting to defend the Constitutional rights of his own citizens.

He could end DADT today, at least in terms of implementation. He does not, contra his repeated assertions, have to enforce a law that is unconstitutional on its face, and he certainly doesn’t have to vigorously appeal to protect the assertion of its Constitutionality. He could stop trying to insert religion into the public sphere on gay marriage.

He could also hire some advisors who aren’t so gobsmackingly stupid as to defame a dead teenager for his ‘lifestyle choice’ while he’s at it.

So the question becomes: does Obama really believe that gay Americans deserve to live as second-class citizens because of some badly translated Iron Age superstition? Or does he believe that they should live that way to serve his political ends?

Or, perhaps, both?

Quick background: A GQ piece floating around recently details that Rand Paul, being a deeply bizarre individual, was up to some strange things in college. He was part of a secret society of, essentially, atheists and irreligious types, who published an underground anti-religious zine and pulled stupid pranks on the hyper-religious Baylor University he was attending at the time.

Libertarians have a long history of flirtation with Atheism, albeit of the ‘I don’t believe in God but gee I think the Free Market is magic’ variety, so this should come as a surprise to precisely nobody; yet of course, it does, because Paul is running as a Republican, though from the Tea Party wing.

There’s a much darker side to that GQ story too: in another incident from his secret society days, Paul and another member supposedly bound and abducted a woman, attempted to force her to smoke pot, and when that failed, forced her to worship ‘Aqua Buddha’ in a creek.

The strangest episode of Paul’s time at Baylor occurred one afternoon in 1983 (although memories about all of these events are understandably a bit hazy, so the date might be slightly off), when he and a NoZe brother paid a visit to a female student who was one of Paul’s teammates on the Baylor swim team. According to this woman, who requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, “He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.” After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. “They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him,” the woman recalls. “They blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’ At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”

Naturally, his opponent, Jack Conway, putatively a Democrat, made an ad about this story. What outraged Jack most?

Well, it sure wasn’t the alleged kidnapping. Here, watch for yourself.

Transcript:
“Why was Rand Paul a member of a secret society that called the Holy Bible a ‘hoax’? That was banned from mocking Christianity and Christ? Why did Rand Paul once tie a woman up, tell her to bow down before a ‘false idol’ and tell her his god was ‘Aqua Buddha’? Why does Rand Paul now want to end all federal faith based initiatives, and even end the deduction for religious charities? Why are there so many questions about Rand Paul?”

Get that? He ‘tied a woman up’, but that is clearly far less serious than the fact that Paul wasn’t a devout Christian, that he mocked ‘Christ’ and the ‘Holy’ Bible and that he made his abductee ‘worship a false idol’. Oh, and Paul wants to end faith-based initiative bailouts, which Conway asserts is a very bad thing indeed.

Quick question, Conway: how can you proclaim an idol ‘false’? Here’s a clue: your God’s fake, he never existed, and Jesus? He may have existed, or not; there is absolutely no hard archaeological evidence that the man ever existed. None. Period.

All stories and accounts about Jesus begin to appear in writing about a half-century after his supposed death. There is far more hard evidence for Atlantis than Jesus.

Yet here we have a DEMOCRAT plainly asserting that an alleged kidnapping is far less important than that Rand Paul didn’t always believe in Jesus. That he prayed to a ‘false idol,’ whatever that means, is more important than binding and kidnapping a college co-ed.

Bonus: Jack Conway is the current Attorney General of Kentucky; a man who thinks that saying bad things about a fictional character trumps kidnapping.

Such is the monstrous perversity of religion.

The perversity of liberal politics, however, means that this incredibly self-indulgent theocratic insanity is actually attracting praise, sometimes from commentators who have long warned against conservatives pushing theocracy!

Digby thinks this is just the sort of advertising we need.

Sarah Posner thinks the ad should have been even more about religion and less about, you know, an alleged felony.

Markos Moulitsas misses the point, but that’s nothing new. Extra special stupid bonus: he thinks it’s just fine that as an Atheist he himself is unelectable in much of America. Well, ok, more like virtually all of America.

So glad to see an Atheist willing to settle for second-class citizenship. Moron.

America continues to disgust me, but the Democrats always find new ways to make it worse.

Update: Conway’s whole campaign seems to be fucking nuts; the religious issue is always more important to them:

“Values matter. Rand Paul chose to join a secret society the university banned,” said Allison Haley, a spokesman for the Conway campaign. “Tying up a woman, no matter what the reason, is nothing to laugh at.”

I’m going to have to rent this guy’s DVD from netflix, at a minimum.

(From Friendly Atheist)

No, really.

Zara has the seed of an idea, believe it or not, but it’s buried beneath paragraphs of the most whiny, self-righteous tripe I’ve had the misfortune to read in a while. There are other serious flaws in his piece too; for example, all of his arguments against God use the Abrahamic conception as a starting point, except for a brief historical discussion of Greco-Roman mythology. You see this sometimes with the Atheist community, it has to be admitted; not just an unfamiliarity with other religious perspectives, but an unwillingness or inability to consider them. It’s an odd form of mental straightjacket, actually; when your average, Western Atheist like Zara states he doesn’t believe in ‘God’, he’s simply ruled out the Abrahamic God in his own mind, and considered the matter settled.

Which is not to say that there’s any evidence for the other religious perspectives either. It’s just that, when making an argument against the existence of something like God, you can’t simply address the singular, narrow religious perspective of a minority of humans alive today, discuss it, and consider the matter thoroughly covered somehow. You’re not addressing the topic, you’re addressing an instance, discussing only Lady Gaga when you mean to talk about music. It’s also not an argument that’s going to hold much water with the vast majority of the human audience, who don’t believe in that Abrahamic God, and never have.

Zara makes this same mistake, the assumption that his personal definition of a concept is absolute and, well, definitive, over and over again. For example, here’s his paragraph on the supernatural:

It’s worth a brief diversion into the idea of the supernatural. What exactly is it? The answer is that it is about fear. The world we see around us is full of pain and tragedy. It’s just not fair. So, for some, it seems only reasonable that there is a realm of justice, a place where wishes can come true; where we need not die permanently. The supernatural is not a place, or a state: it is a desire. This leads some to set up a false dichotomy between the natural and supernatural, between the heartless, unfeeling and cruel world of atoms and the void, and the place where morality is as real as words carved on stone and God loves things into existence.

I’m so glad that I now know, with absolute certainty and for all time, what the word ‘supernatural’ means, and that all about ‘fear’. Here I thought that a reasonable argument for supernatural might simply be ‘beyond the natural world’. We should fire the staff at the OED at once, and replace them with Steve Zara, for he has all the answers. *rolls eyes*

Zara’s piece concludes thusly:

The theists can’t win. They can’t talk about evidence when they base their beliefs on faith. They can’t describe us as flawed beings and yet claim that we can get to truth through revelation. (Incidentally, when the Pope decides to be infallible, how can he be sure of the infallibilty of that decision? But I digress).

Theists hide God beyond rules and logic in the supernatural, and then claim that we can get to God through the rules and logic of theology. We are supposed to use logic to demonstrate the illogical.

…

I propose a new strident atheism. No playing the games of theists. No concessions. No talk of evidence that can change minds, when their beliefs are deliberately placed beyond logic, beyond evidence. Let’s not get taken in by the fraud of religion. Let’s not play their shell-game.

Do you see the flaw here, and the core of a useful idea? Let’s hit the flaw first.

Zara (and Myers acting in agreement) makes a fatal mistake here: he extends the concept of there being no evidence of this particular conception of God’s existence that could conform to the rules we humans live and function by, as empiricists and material beings, to the idea that there can be no evidence at all for God’s existence.

That’s a big leap, and unsupportable.

Zara is right to point out that, if you posit a being that is beyond logic and understanding, you can’t reasonably use logic and understanding to arrive at knowledge of said being. He’s right to point out that you can’t use tools of the natural sciences to study the supernatural, something that is defined, at a minimum, as being beyond the rules and order of the natural world.

But it’s a fallacy to assume that, just because the tools of one world can’t be used to understand something, that such understanding is impossible.

The classic literary example is that of Flatland. For two-dimensional creatures, what can the third dimension really mean? At best, an abstract understanding. Could they truly even conceive of it, in their world? Could they actually imagine, picture such a place, in their minds? Can a human being actually form a mental picture of a five, ten, seventy-three-dimensional form, and truly grasp it? What would happen if you could take a peek into such a realm?

In the Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost”, two human beings get to see into such a higher-dimensional space, and they can’t make any meaning of it. It’s not that their eyes don’t work, or that light doesn’t travel in such a space; they do, and it does. It’s that their minds, fashioned in our four dimensional world, cannot comprehend, are not accessible to, knowledge from a higher dimensional number. So they’re blind while seeing perfectly well.

Is that what would actually happen? I don’t know, and what’s more, you don’t either; that’s rather the point.

Zara’s right that logic can’t meaningfully consider illogical evidence. He’s wrong that such evidence is automatically invalid. If the Great Old Ones actually exist, in terrifying alien spaces beyond human understanding, where the rules of our physical universe not only don’t apply but cannot apply, then the fact that you can’t describe them using geometry and physics doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means that discussing C’thulhu in terms of gravity is absurd. On the other hand, to C’thulhu, gravity itself is absurd, and by the way, you’re very tasty.

*crunch*

So yes, you can’t have a meaningful argument using empirical tools on an anti-empirical subject like religion, and yes, it’s pointless to argue over such evidence with theologians. That doesn’t mean you can be justified in making a blanket statement like ‘there is no evidence that you can give to prove God exists’. You might not be able to make use of that evidence, understand it, even process it, any more than a Flatlander could use a pop-up book, but that doesn’t preclude the existence of either the pop-up book or evidence for God. You’re confusing ‘evidence’ with ‘evidence I am equipped and capable of understanding in the systems of knowledge that are accessible to me’.

Unfortunately, Myers jumps on this bandwagon:

So yes, I agree. There is no valid god hypothesis, so there can be no god evidence, so let’s stop pretending the believers have a shot at persuading us.

Jerry Coyne took him to task, proposing a particular, outlandishly implausible example of an event that would make a reasonable person conclude there might be something to this God thing, and Myers tried to respond, but didn’t do a terribly great job.

Coyne crafted an argument where it would require a greater leap of faith to disbelieve the evidence of God than to do otherwise, and Myers’ response seems to be… awfully.. dogmatic.

Much of his counterargument boils down to the fact that Coyne’s example isn’t really like any of the religions around today, which misses the point entirely; the argument isn’t whether a particular God exists, but whether there could be, anywhere, any sort of evidence that would lead you to believe in ANY God.

Myers and Zara say, with absolute faith and conviction, that there is not. No matter what you, or anyone else, or anything else, or any possible experience or evidence says, they will not change their iron-clad beliefs. It’s not just that the evidence needed to convince them is inconceivable at the moment; they categorically and for all time deny that it could ever be.

That, my friends, is faith in a nutshell. Faith, taking a particular form, is also known as religion.

Congratulations, PZ: you just found religion. Enjoy.

It’s been a busy few weeks for religious zealots with a hate-on for Atheists, I have to say.

First up, Rabbi Lapin, a member of Glenn Beck’s little Black Robe Regiment group of creepy theocrat wannabes, had this to say on the September 3rd episode:

“I tell them directly, I do believe, that Atheists are parasites.”

(my transcription, so if I got a word wrong, try not to burn me at the stake or what not)

You see, we’re ‘benefitting’ from the ‘energy’ put out by religious folks without putting anything into the system. Honestly, it sounds like some nerdy explanation of The Force as much as anything else.

However, as the Young Turks and David Neiwart have documented, Lapin’s hardly new to Atheist bashing, and perhaps worse. About the religious vs. the non-religious in the US, Lapin said:

“I am absolutely convinced that God is far from finished with the story of the United States of America,” he said by way of summation. “First of all, [there's] the matter of the little battle that must be fought, just as it was in the 19th century.” There were, and are, “two incompatible moral visions for this country. We had to settle it then. We’re going to have to settle it now. I hope not with blood, not with guns, but we’re going to have to settle it nonetheless. The good news is that I think our side is finally ready to settle it. Roll up its sleeves, take off its jacket, and get a little bloody. Spill a little blood. We’ll settle it. And we’ll win. And then there’s no holding us back.”

(Just for a little left-wing solidarity I feel I should point out that Lapin hates teh Gay with equal fervor)

Over in Europe meanwhile, the Pope is making his grand UK appearance, full of pomp and speechifying, with enormous, nay, lavish amounts of security at taxpayer expense, naturally. Don’t worry though, he’s not there to humbly beg forgiveness for the innumerable sex scandals plaguing his institution, he’s there to bring the smack down on the Atheists:

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny”.

Of course the idea that Nazi Germany was Atheistic is utter nonsense, and the idea that Hitler was an Atheist rather dubious at best. He certainly claimed, over and over, to be a Christian, and had effusive praise for the power of religion, specifically claiming to be a Catholic, and that Christianity informed and guided his particular brand of insanity.

Considering the Catholic Church’s troubled relationship with fascism, ie, its often open support of Fascist dictatorships as a bulwark against Communism, I’m somewhat amused by the sheer unmitigated gall the current leader of that religion has to lay Hitler at *our* feet.

Ah well.

Needless to say this speech hasn’t gone over well with the UK’s large Atheist/Irreligious community, or, say, Richard Dawkins:

This statement by the pope, on his arrival in Edinburgh, is a despicable outrage. Even if Hitler had been an atheist, his political philosophy was not based upon atheism and had no connection with atheism. Hitler was arguably (and by his own account) a Roman Catholic. In any case he enjoyed the open support of many of the most senior catholic clergy in Germany and the less demonstrative support of Pope Pius XII. Even if Hitler had been an atheist (he certainly was not), the rank and file Germans who carried out the attempted extermination of the Jews were Christians, almost to a man: either Catholic or Lutheran, primed to their anti-Semitism by centuries of Catholic propaganda about ‘Christ-killers’ and by Martin Luther’s own seething hatred of the Jews. To mention Ratzinger’s membership of the Hitler Youth might be thought to be fighting dirty, but my feeling is that the gloves are off after this disgraceful paragraph by the pope.

I shy away from the Hitler Youth thing, if only because he’s currently, as we speak, the head of an international conspiracy to hide child molestors from the law.

Not that he’ll admit the scope of the rot within the organization supposedly under his control, of course.

There is perhaps a bright side though; attendance at the Pope’s events is far, far below expectations, and the Humanists in Scotland are ready for his visit with some hilarious billboards touting the country’s rapidly growing secularism.

Heh heh. Made me laugh, anyway.

Still, I see stories like this and I can’t help but wonder at the whole spectacle. Religious figures really can get away with saying whatever ignorant, hateful thing they want about atheists, can’t they? There’s really no consequence for doing so. It’s completely within the scope of acceptable political discourse.

(Inevitably necessary disclaimer: Yes, they have the free speech right to say these things, at least here in America, though Lapin’s edging pretty close to inciting violence. The point is that, come next week, Lapin will still give appearances and go on tv without being noted as a vile eliminationist, and the Pope will still be ranting about Atheists causing all the woes in the world, and that’s apparently perfectly acceptable. Imagine the outcry if you substituted ‘Islam’ for atheism, or ‘Jews’ for atheist, in this type of speech. Don’t you think the reaction would differ?)

That is, if you’re reasonable. It looks like the administration at Queensland University of Technology is anything but.

A quick recap of events: QUT lawyer (apparently he works on contracts) Alex Stewart is an Atheist, somewhat active in a Brisbane organization of likeminded people. After hearing of the mass hysteria resulting from the small, non-violent planned (and eventually cancelled) protest of one Florida man at his tiny church, Stewart decided to do some burning of his own.

However, unlike Terry Jones, he seems to have a sense of humor, and wanted to do it for a ‘good purpose’, and so he engaged in a bit of Mythbusters-esque testing to determine which made for better rolling papers, pages from a Koran, or a Bible.

(Not that this is the first time I’ve heard of using a Bible for that purpose; far from it.)

Taking things a step further, he filmed the whole ‘experiment’, along with a genial discussion of the merits of religious literature, and put it up on Youtube.

Nobody was hurt. Nobody was killed. The Earth didn’t fly off its axis, the Sun didn’t explode, and despite this prodding, God did not make himself physically manifest or smite Mr. Stewart for his cheek. The entire event occurred in the privacy of Stewart’s home, in his off hours, with books that he himself owned.

No crime was committed. (Don’t believe me? Fair enough. Click this link and watch the embedded video/news report; at about 55 seconds in, a spokesman for the Queensland police makes clear that it is not an offense to burn ANY book in Australia)

Yet Stewart found himself at the center of a firestorm. Depending on which press account you believe, he was either ‘hauled’ before the QUT administration or met with them voluntarily, and has in any case been placed on administrative leave while they decide whether he gets to keep his job and ‘investigate all aspects of Mr. Stewart’s behavior.” Meanwhile the local press is staging hit pieces and hatchet jobs on the man, stalking him with cameras and talking up the ‘collateral damage’ he caused with a goofy Youtube video.

Keep in mind, again, that the police have already stated for the record that burning the pages was completely legal under Australian law.

So if Stewart didn’t break Aussie law, why is his job in jeopardy? Why is QUT, a public university, harassing an employee for a legal form of protest in which no one was injured, let alone killed, and the books burned were the property of Mr. Stewart?

As far as I can tell from their public statements, it’s because he hurt the feelings of religious people, and that’s something That Simply Is Not Done.

Check out the statement their Vice-Chancellor (and humorless blowhard) gave to the press:

QUT vice-chancellor Peter Coaldrake moved to distance the university from its employee.

“QUT does not condone the destruction of any religious artefacts. This was a personal view and action expressed in the person’s own time,” Professor Coaldrake said.

“[Mr Stewart] does not associate himself with QUT in the clip.

“QUT is tolerant of all religions and welcomes staff and students from many countries to our university and regularly celebrates their cultures and religions.”

A personal view, expressed on personal time, with no endorsement claimed by Stewart from the University for his actions.. and yet he’s put on leave, pending an investigation.

But they’re tolerant of all ‘religions’ at QUT, so bashing, even suspending Atheists for legal speech is apparently within their mandate.

Globally, the mass uprising against Koran burning has yet to occur, though as Professor Cole notes over at his blog, the Taliban, lovely people that they are, have seen fit to demagogue on these peaceful and legal activities to their own benefit:

Saturday witnessed a second wave of demonstrations against the threats by small American fundamentalist churches (especially the Dove Outreach group of some 50 in Gainesville, Fl.), to burn copies of the Muslim holy book, the Quran, on September 11. News that the planned bonfire of the scripture had been called off did not reach the provinces in time to avert the rallies, which were sparked in part by Taliban pamphleteering against the US.

But it seems clear to me in any case that the threat of Quran-burning by a few dozen kooks in the US is only a pretext for these demonstrations, which inevitably are actually about the grievances of Afghans under foreign military occupation.

Wait, you mean.. this tempest in a teapot is being used by unscrupulous religious zealots to make names for themselves? I never would have guessed!

As usual, PZ Myers, himself an experienced destroyer of so-called ‘Holy’ items, has been out in front of this whole series of overreactions to peaceful protest:

Informing me that the Muslims are genuinely and sincerely and deeply offended is not informative — contrary to the suggestion that I must have an empathy deficit to be unaware of that, I know that and appreciate the fact that their feelings are hurt and they are angry and outraged. My point is that I don’t care, and neither should anyone else. The Abrahamic religions are all about fostering that feeling of oppression, even when it isn’t there, and hearing yet another one of the more deranged members of the People of the Book whine that we show insufficient respect for their mythology gives me the same feeling of exasperation I felt when my small children would wail about not getting a candy bar in the grocery store. Fine, you can be mad about your deprivation, but that does not obligate me to serve your whims.

…

I’ve seen enough videos of Middle Eastern protesters setting American flags on fire that I do have to wonder…how would they feel if we informed those countries that people who disrespect the United States ought to be arrested and their demonstrations shut down by force? The people Jones has offended feel no compunction about offending other Americans right back — and that’s OK. It is not a crime to offend others, and in fact, it’s pretty much a natural consequence of having diverse cultures.

I highly recommend you read the whole thing; it’s that good.

So where does this leave us? Hard to say. Western nations with free speech guarantees are buckling in the face of hurt feelings and vague, poorly defined threats of violence, compromising their most fundamental principles because, well, there aren’t that many Atheists/malcontents and they’re easier to kick around, I guess. One thing’s for certain, though; the Stewart case shows us, with crystal clarity, that protests of this sort are going to continue, one way or another, so as a society we’d be better-served coming to grips with that reality instead of shutting our eyes and hoping against hope that the irreligious (or in Jones’ case, hyper-religious) will swallow their pride and give up their rights and their ideas without a fight.

Or, you know, funny Youtube videos.

Even more startling than the press and blogging fixation on the backers of a tiny, non-violent form of political protest has been the level of governmental pressure, arguably even harassment, of the people looking to conduct it. The FBI showed up to interview the pastor. Immaculately dressed Florida Governor Charlie Christ called on Jones not to start a smaller fire than many people use to roast weenies over Haloween. Defense Secretary Robert Gates phoned Jones to try and stop the protest. Even President Obama felt the need to publicly condemn the harmless burning of a small pile of paper, putting a good boot into American Atheists while he did so.

And of course, foreign governments feel the need to meddle with an entirely internal American matter.

But wait; it gets better. The Vatican has a position!

Burning the Quran would be an “outrageous and grave gesture,” the Vatican said Wednesday, joining a chorus of voices pleading with a small Florida church not to burn Islam’s holy book on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Hmm, yes, those paragons of moral virtue at the Vatican condemned burning the Koran. Being good-natured I’ll leave the issue of their credibility vis a vis relations with the Islamic world aside (*cough*Crusades*cough*) for the moment.

Still, all this concern over a tiny protest at an even tinier church? All this poring over documents in search of financial irregularities because someone wanted to make a name for himself with a bonfire? Really?

Isn’t there any more important scandal in the world of religion we could be discussing?

How about, say, this one,with a hat tip to PZ Myers:

‘No Belgian church escaped sex abuse’, finds investigation
Child sex abuse by clergy or church workers has taken place in every Roman Catholic congregation in Belgium, according to an independent commission investigating paedophilia allegations.

Yes, that’s right, the global pedophilia network sometimes referred to as the Catholic Church has been exposed in yet another nation, this time Belgium, home of waffles, in which an investigation discovered that, and I swear I’m not exaggerating, every single solitary Catholic church in the country had at some point been home to the sexual abuse of minors by clergy or staff.

Every. Single. One.

This is of course only part of a far, far larger conspiracy to cover up, even facilitate the sexual abuse of children, going back many decades and reaching to the highest corridors of power within the Vatican.

Well, maybe it was just the Belgian branch of the church that was this deranged, right? Well, no… and in Ireland the sheer depth of the depravity found in the Catholic organization is rocking their society to the core.

Even the police aided and abetted the sexual abuse of children, deferring to the Church’s authority and refusing to pursue cases against molestors in robes. The moral exemplars in the hierachy, meanwhile, coerced children into taking vows of silence against their abusers.

Perhaps these cases are too distant for a direct comparison, though; I mean, the koran burning was to happen here, on American soil. That makes it our problem, right?

Fair enough. How about this example, then:

On the morning of January 14 in Seattle, Ken Roosa and a small group Alaska Natives stood on the sidewalk outside Seattle University to announce a new lawsuit against the Jesuits, claiming a widespread conspiracy to dump pedophile priests in isolated Native villages where they could abuse children off the radar.

“They did it because there was no money there, no power, no police,” Roosa said to the assembled cameras and microphones. “It was a pedophile’s paradise.” He described a chain of poor Native villages where priests—many of them serial sex offenders—reigned supreme. “We are going to shine some light on a dark and dirty corner of the Jesuit order.”

Don’t worry about it, though! The Church is on top of the matter (no jokes please). How seriously do they take it? Well, look how they deal with it under their own, precious, extremely harsh church law: raping a small child is every bit as serious as ordaining a female priest.

Yes, their priorities are clearly straight, and so are ours, when an international, decades long global conspiracy to aid, abet and cover-up the sexual abuse of children makes so much less news than one sad, attention-seeking man starting a tiny fire.

But hey – I hear that Terry Jones might have lied on his tax returns! News at 11! Let’s get that (not-quite) koran burner!

Obama said he was proud the country had rallied around the idea that we can’t be divided because of religion or ethnicity – and hopes that is something that can continue.

“We are all Americans, we stand together,” Obama said. “I think it is absolutely important now for majority of Americans to hang onto that thing that is best in us: a belief in religious tolerance. We have to make sure we don’t start turning on each other.”

“We are one nation under God. We may call that God different names, but we are one nation.”

He really, really doesn’t want to know the names I’ve called his God. I’ll make a point of coming up with a few more later this morning, right before I blaspheme and break some commandments.

(Maybe coveting, that one’s easy. I could make an idol to worship for a day before I toss it in the trash, which is the natural home for religious materials in my home anyway. I did find some modeling clay in the storage room this afternoon… maybe make a calf statue, slap some gold paint on it, go all Old Testament for a lark.)

Reading this tripe was a fine way to cap off a lousy week of listening to people bleat about what a terrible tragedy it would be if someone burned a book, ostensibly because it might make someone else mad at our troops somewhere. Glenn Greenwald’s done yeoman’s work on that particular load of nonsense; suffice it to say, I think he’s right that the the Islamic world maybe, just *maybe* is angrier at us for slaughtering their family members by the tens of thousands than they’ll get for an impromptu paperback BBQ in Florida.

Still, I guess it was time for the periodic pro-religious unity propaganda, to put us silly non-believers back in our place.

As PZ Myers said:

Tolerance is a good idea. But Obama has just divided the nation, forgetting all of his previous brief, superficial mentions of non-believers, into those who are part of his one nation under God, and the rest of us, who are…what? Not part of the nation?

Thanks for reminding me where I stand in the glorious American experiment, Obama. I’m so glad we elected a Constitutional ‘scholar’… albeit one who apparently never read the First Amendment.

I’m so glad I keep tequila in the house.

And just to be absolutely clear; I am an American and part of this nation, but I am under no one’s god. Not now, not ever.

The juvenile “draw Muhammad” day has generally been avoided by professional editorial cartoonists. One Islamophobic theme apparent in the writing on it is that Muslims are peculiar in their thin-skinned responses to such assaults on their religious sensibilities and that members of other religions never riot or protest. This assertion is not only bigoted but it is silly. So here are some other needlessly offensive cartoon-drawing days that could be adopted by the jerks bothering Muslims today, just to show that they are jerks toward other communities as well. All these subjects have produced vigorous protests or rioting and violence among members of other religious traditions. Me, I think when you know people have died in violence over some piece of thoughtlessness, it is the height of irresponsibility to repeat it for no good reason.

I don’t doubt for a moment that there are various Muslim-bashers who jumped on the bandwagon for DMD, but I think the necessity of engaging in such behavior is demonstrated by the same events that lead Prof. Cole to conclude it’s irresponsible; namely, that religious fanatics often respond to dissenting views with violence. Since these whackjobs seek to suppress the rights of others, they need to be opposed, period. There’s no other justification required. It’s further incumbent, I think, upon citizens of the world’s remaining superpower, an ostensibly secular state, to carry out peaceful protest and opposition to these violent idiots, since we can do so in relative safety.

If it’s become irresponsible to challenge backwards fanatics, haven’t they already won? Don’t we lose our rights when we refuse to exercise them out of fear of illegal, violent retaliation?

Professor Cole then outlines a list of other drawing-based protests he came up with to show that, as he put it, you can be a jerk to a wide variety of people, not just Muslims. I disagree with the contention that DMD was targeted at Muslims as a whole, but I’m perfectly willing to extend the idea to challenge other groups of zealots who’ve trampled on the right to free expression. That, for me, was the whole point of DMD.

Thus, I completed his challenge, with some minor variations and two omissions for cause:

Proposed Comics #9, 6, and 1 concern the same Ultra-Orthodox extremists in Jerusalem, hating on, respectively, secular government social services, gay people and parking lots being open on Saturday. I compressed this into one comic to save time.

Proposed Comic #7 is about reaction to the performance of a play which concerns, at least in part, rape and violence in a Sikh temple. I completely support the right of a theatrical company to present such a play, but rape is, morally and legally, an offensive act in and of itself, so I won’t risk trivializing it with stick figure art. Thus, the cartoon concerns a stick figure PERFORMANCE of the same play that inspired violence.

Proposed Comic #5 concerns the idea of depicting the violent murder of a Hindu teacher in India, an event that set off a firestorm of retaliatory violence on both sides of a mixed Christian-Hindu community in India. The actual, real life murder of a teacher and his students is not equivalent to the performance of play, or the drawing of a semi-mythological figure from religion. It’s a crime, and a brutal offense. People being upset by it is perfectly rational and understandable, and while violent response to violence is often unproductive, it can’t be condemned in the same way as violence over a cartoon or a doodle. If someone shot up your school, you too might take up arms and commit retaliatory violence. A cartoon on the other hand never killed anyone. For this reason, I’ve omitted #5 entirely; it’s false equivalence to compare these events to violently responding to a form of personal expression.

Proposed Comic #2 concerns a Burger King advertisement in Spain that I think is utterly hilarious. It was also found to be offensive by members of the global Hindu community, and they responded by complaining to the corporation, which pulled the ad. The article mentions no violence or threats of any kind, simply public condemnation. This is how things are SUPPOSED to work in a civilized society; dialogue and conversation with, or at, people who upset you, not oppression or violent censorship. I think this is another false equivalence; you have every right to be offended by speech. Just don’t throw a brick through a window or plant a bomb or set someone’s house on fire. I see no reason to poke fun at a religious community that apparently chose an honorable and reasonable, above all CIVIL response to something that they found offensive.

(Burger King also ran an add that offended Mexican governmental officials, and that was pulled without violence. They really should get a better handle on their PR campaigns.)

So, with two exceptions and some modifications, I’ve taken up the challenge Prof. Cole outlined. While I am a jerk, I hope this goes some way to demonstrating that I’m not specifically being a jerk to Muslims. Rather, I want to annoy anyone who’d threaten or employ violence to silence criticism or commentary on their various mythological beliefs. I think it was that way for many people participating in Draw Muhammad Day.

Without further adieu, here are the truly awful drawings in question, including the original for DMD.

Muhammad Riding a Dinosaur

Naked Hindu Goddesses Riding a Plesiosaur

Various Offensive Things for Ultra Orthodox Zealots with Pteranodon

Stick Figure Production of Play Bezhti (with T-Rex in Audience)

Pool Party with Bikini Girls and Buddha Statue (with Velociraptors)

Orangemen Parade in Northern Ireland (with Pachycephalosaurus)

Soccer Player Using Witchcraft During Game in Kinshasa, with Stegosaurus. (Note: This drawing does not indicate in any way that I believe actual witchcraft occurred)

The entire set can be viewed on a subset of my Flickr page.