By way of refreshment – a bit of John Cleese and Michael Palin attempting to argue with Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood the Bishop of Southwark about the merits and blasphemous nature of The Life of Brian. Muggeridge is extraordinarily rude and unpleasant, and Stockwood carries on like a Monty Python character himself.

Michael Palin was here on a book tour about 15 years ago and he gave a talk at a bookstore, with Q&A. During the Q&A he talked about this encounter, and said that it made him uncharacteristically shirty (his word). I can see why – Muggeridge and Stockwood breezily accuse them of lying, just for one thing. They’re poisonous. Dear dear Christianity, so bad for the character.… Read the rest

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From Mrs. Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian.

If corporations had to tithe 10% of their income to every religion they claim to follow, they’d quickly petition the Supreme Court to stop calling them people.

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Originally a comment by Seth on It turns out nice people are Nazis!

It’s not true, in general, that ‘nice people are Nazis’. But the converse was true; i.e., the average Nazi was a ‘nice’ and ‘good’ and ‘decent’ person, as measured by the standards of their peers. Upwards of five hundred thousand people (only half of them Germans) were involved in the Holocaust (which rendered extinct approximately twelve million people, about half of them Jewish); by far, the vast majority of these people were ‘just doing their jobs’, being nice and agreeable, attempting to make the world a better place. That was their intent (and the stated intent of every single National Socialist). That is one major reason why … Read the rest

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The Vatican bounces from triumph to triumph. While its US arm was rejoicing at the Catholic victory handed down by the Supreme Court, the head office was giving a huge boost to the people who hunt and torture “witches”.

Exorcists now have an extra weapon in their fight against evil – the official backing of the Catholic church. The Vatican has formally recognised the International Association of Exorcists, a group of 250 priests in 30 countries who liberate the faithful from demons.

Notice the wording. (That’s the Associated Press saying that, published by the Guardian.) Note the absence of scare-quotes on “evil” and “demons.”

The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano reported this week that the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy had approved

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Mubarak Bala is out of the psych ward he was forced into but he’s not out of danger.

A Nigerian atheist released from a psychiatric unit to which his Muslim family committed him by force has said he is getting death threats for blaspheming against Islam.

Mubarak Bala, a 29-year-old chemical process engineer, said he is in hiding in predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria where sharia law holds and some interpretations deem blasphemy punishable by death.

“People are threatening me, I mean life-threatening threats,” he said on Thursday. He said he was too frightened of drawing attention and wouldn’t allow an Associated Press video journalist or photographer to come to his hiding place.

Bala said that since he renounced Islam and

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The Onion has 4th of July safety tips.

• Most serious injuries happen on July 4th, so set off your explosives on the day before or the day after.

That’s the best tip; I’ll stick with that one.

 … Read the rest

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Just following orders. The Milgram experiment. You know the drill.

Can it be cut up into smaller pieces? Of course it can.

A new Milgram-like experiment published this month in the Journal of Personality has taken this idea to the next step by trying to understand which kinds of people are more or less willing to obey these kinds of orders. What researchers discovered was surprising: Those who are described as “agreeable, conscientious personalities” are more likely to follow orders and deliver electric shocks that they believe can harm innocent people, while “more contrarian, less agreeable personalities” are more likely to refuse to hurt others.

Ok wait. Slow down. Let’s not be in a hurry. Part of me is very

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Nick Little has a post analyzing the Hobby Lobby ruling at the CFI blog. This is good, because I was wishing I could hear from him or Eddie Tabash or both. I talked to the two of them for a few minutes at Women in Secularism and the conversation was all about SCOTUS and Hobby Lobby and Kennedy (“it’s Justice Kennedy’s world and we all live in it”). I like lawyers’ shop talk when it’s about subjects of general interest. (Patent law and the like, not so much.)

Standing

According to the majority, for-profit corporations now have religious freedom rights. Commentators have been quick to point out that Alito sought to restrict this to closely held companies (which includes

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Slate has a frightening analysis of the Hobby Lobby ruling.

For the first time, the court has interpreted a federal statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (or RFRA), as affording more protection for religion than has ever been provided under the First Amendment. While some have read Hobby Lobby as a narrow statutory ruling, it is much more than that. The court has eviscerated decades of case law and, having done that, invites a new generation of challenges to federal laws, including those designed to protect civil rights.

To see how we got here requires some history. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court adopted an expansive interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. In

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Via WPLR New Haven:

… Read the rest

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Nested ironies in Georgia.

On the first day of the new Georgia Safe Carry Protection Act, a misunderstanding between two armed men in a convenience store Tuesday led to a drawn firearm and a man’s arrest.

What’s even funnier is what the misunderstanding was about.

A man carrying a holstered firearm entered the store to make a purchase. Another customer, also with a holstered firearm, approached him and demanded to see his identification and firearms license, according to the Valdosta Police Department report.
The customer making demands for ID pulled his firearm from its holster but never pointed it at the other customer, who said he was not obligated to show any permits or identification.
He demanded the man’s

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Yes, still. I guess it went so well last time, with the whole “if I told Hitler ‘stop killing people you cunt’ then people would scold me for sexism” caper. This time it’s cruelty to animals instead of Hitler. It’s a public post on Facebook.

Ricky Gervais

I did a tweet once calling those who skin dogs alive, cunts and someone actually bothered to comment on my language, not the inhumane torture.

25,508 Likes  764 Shares

First comment:

And those who complained are cunts.

587 Likes

There was a little time between the screen grab and now – half an hour or so. There are now 27,882 Likes on Gervais’s post and 633 on the first comment.

Imagine if … Read the rest

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Janelle Assellin on Wonder Woman and the new team writing and drawing her.

DC has a Wonder Woman problem. Or perhaps more accurately, Wonder Woman has a DC problem. The idea of Wonder Woman as a feminist icon is so imprinted in her history, and in analysis of the character, that separating her from feminism should be near impossible. But that hasn’t stopped people trying.

Much has been written over the years about the ebb and flow of feminism in the Wonder Woman comics, the relative feminism of her appearances on the small screen, and her role as an icon for the movement. A recent interview with the new Wonder Woman creative team of Meredith Finch and David Finch

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Sarah Posner reported on this back in August 2012.

Rcent disclosures by the Department of Justice reveal that the Obama administration has continued a policy, first put in place by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Justice Department, of granting faith-based recipients of taxpayer dollars certificates of exemption from federal laws prohibiting religious discrimination in employment by such organizations receiving federal funds.  

A very good book about the Bush-era origins of this is Kingdom Coming by Michelle Goldberg.

Since President Barack Obama launched his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships shortly after taking office in 2009, the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD) has been assiduously asking the administration a simple question: why are faith-based organizations that

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The Washington Post reports on That Letter. (Yes I’m going to run this to death. You bet I am. Those smug sanctimonious pieces of shit – we need to push back.)

Fourteen prominent faith leaders — including some of President Obama’s closest advisers — want the White House to create a religious exemption from his planned executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against gays and lesbians in hiring.

A letter to the White House, sent Tuesday and made public Wednesday, includes the signatures of Michael Wear, faith director for Obama’s 2012 campaign; Stephen Schneck, a leader of Catholic outreach in 2012; and Florida megapastor Joel Hunter, whom Obama has described as a close spiritual counselor.

Obama … Read the rest

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The letter from the “faith leaders” to Obama is full of the usual oily empty bafflegab to dress up the fact that they’re asking him to let them discriminate against a set of people for no good reason.

Americans have always disagreed on important issues, but our ability to live with our diversity is part of what makes this country great, and it continues to be essential even in this 21st century. This ability is essential in light of our national conversation on political and cultural issues related to sexuality. We have and will continue to communicate on these broader issues to our congregations, our policymakers and our nation, but we focus here on the importance of a religious exemption

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