Religion

God's America: weep for it. WEEP I SAY.

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

I’m pretty inured by now to blatant religious proselytization, bad acting, campy premises, and contrived patriotism, what with Mock the Movie and all, but this video almost made me gag, it was simply so syrupy.

Yes. Because a DOUBLE X porno watched with friends, or being intoxicated in public, is the END OF AMERICA. There is no hyperbole there. Just by doing things that are enjoyable to you and do no damage to others, you will destroy the very fabric of your country, setting flags ablaze nationwide. Just a second, I’m going to go pour myself a drink so I can end America. I guess that makes me a foreign terrorist, being that I’m a Canadian citizen and having a beer, amirite?

Hat tip to Christian Nightmares.

Unrelated note: Blogging about news events et cetera will be on pause for a bit, as tomorrow I’ll be flying out to DC. Remember that one big conference that’s happening there this weekend? You know, Women In Secularism 2? Well, you should, because you helped send me there. And in return, I’ll be live-blogging the living crap outta it, along with Miri Mogilevski of Brute Reason, and Kate Donovan, co-blogger at… um… everywhere. Seriously. Including over at Ashley Miller’s.

Look for the posts starting tomorrow.

God's America: weep for it. WEEP I SAY.
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Geeks Without God: Crappy Religious Board Game Edition!

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , 12 Comments

Two weekends ago, I went to OmegaCon in Siren, Wisconsin. And by “went”, I mean “was kidnapped and made to go”. There, I played some board games with a whole lot of local board game nerds who frequent the local convention nerdery circuit. Many of these games were fun. The one that Molly and Nick Glover and Tim Wick forced Stephanie, Brianne and I play, though… um… well, that was significantly less so. It was loosely based on the “hit” movie based on the “hit” Christian novel series, Left Behind. “Loose” is definitely the operative word when describing this board game, because it barely qualified as a board game. I shit you not — we played Left Behind: The Movie: The Board Game.

Click the thumbnail below for a fuller experience of the pain we endured for your entertainment. Screen reader users: it’s a picture of the board game. Sorry that you’ll have to make do with the audio descriptions — though really, you’re the lucky ones, with limited exposure to its whargarbl.

leftbehindboardgame

In a desperate effort to make the podcast fun — because the game’s mechanics are unbelievably boring even to someone with a vested interest in proving themselves the best Tribulation Forces fighters and redeeming themselves in the eyes of Yahweh, you know, like me — the Geeks Without God crew helpfully included the following drinking game to accompany the podcast. I need to disclaimer this, though. Unless you’re a bull elephant, you’ll have to drink something piss weak to survive.

Here are the rules (feel free to add your own rules in the comments):

Take a drink every time moonshine soaked cherries are passed out or someone mentions consuming one

Take a drink whenever we make a Ghostbusters reference

Take a drink every time someone mentions game theory

Take a drink every time someone says the game sucks

Take a drink every time someone lands on a Carpathia square

Take a drink every time someone says “Flightplan.”

Take a drink every time we get a question about the bible correct

Take a drink any time someone mentions Omegacon

Seriously, just don’t do it. You’ll die.

Go listen. We played so you never, ever, ever have to.

Though if you really must, it’s fairly cheap.

Geeks Without God: Crappy Religious Board Game Edition!

WaPo: Homegrown radicals opposed "US actions in the Muslim world". See what they did there?

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , , , , 10 Comments

I have hardly had any time lately to blog (or much of anything leisure-related, honestly), but I’ve been trying to keep an eye on how the media’s been reporting on the Boston Marathon bombing. With Glenn Beck and the rest of the right-wing desperate to make this bombing about Islam, to fuel the rampant anti-Muslim racism in the States presently, this particular news article jumped at me as just a little too blatant about drawing links that aren’t there. It takes some ridiculous contortions to make the Boston bombing suspects’ actions have anything whatsoever to do with Islam, and the Washington Post was more than willing to pretzel themselves in an article purporting to explain how the brothers are essentially home-grown domestic terrorists with non-existent ties to outside influence.

The wording here is just too precious:

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed by police as the two attempted to avoid capture, do not appear to have been directed by a foreign terrorist organization.

Rather, the officials said, the evidence so far suggests they were “self-radicalized” through Internet sites and U.S. actions in the Muslim world. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has specifically cited the U.S. war in Iraq, which ended in December 2011 with the removal of the last American forces, and the war in Afghanistan, where President Obama plans to end combat operations by the end of 2014.

Emphasis mine.

Continue reading “WaPo: Homegrown radicals opposed "US actions in the Muslim world". See what they did there?” →

WaPo: Homegrown radicals opposed "US actions in the Muslim world". See what they did there?

Thou Shalt Pirate Pornography

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

A few people are pointing this out as an example of some of the religious hypocrisy endemic in organized Catholicism. While they’re making a good case about it — this is in fact hypocritical, if you consider piracy stealing — I’d rather point out that this makes these people every bit as human as anyone else. They are not special, they are not sacred, and they are not better than anyone else in any way.

What am I talking about this time? Another sex scandal, perhaps? Well, tangentially, maybe. But in this case, it’s priests admitting to downloading DVD screeners of yet-unreleased movies, and logs of holy men downloading some perfectly ordinary lesbian and BDSM pornography.

But not just any holy men… the IPs in question belong to people inside the Holy See.

Helped by Scaneye, TorrentFreak decided to take a look at the recent downloading habits of people living in the most religious city-state in the world – the Vatican.

The Vatican is a small place so downloading levels are very low. However, we did notice that one particular IP address came up a number of times, on each occasion linked to TV shows such as Chicago Fire, Lightfields, The Neighbours and Touch. Another IP address showed an interest in The Americans.
[…]
In the interests of science we researched each of the titles (including the curiously named RS77_Episode 01) and discovered that downloaders in the Vatican have one or two unusual ‘niche’ interests. We won’t link to our discoveries here, but feel free to do your own ‘research’ using the titles shown above. There isn’t a commandment that covers these films directly, but some might argue there should be.

Continue reading “Thou Shalt Pirate Pornography” →

Thou Shalt Pirate Pornography

Paul Cameron: "Gays more likely to have sex with kids and animals, according to survey produced by My Rectum"

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 15 Comments

Okay, that’s not an exact quote, but damned if it’s not close enough to be serviceable. Some survey this anti-gay group produced, has apparently determined that a quarter of gays have had sex with kids or animals. I’d love to see the methodology used. Actually, hell — I’d love to see evidence that the “survey” exists at all.

How many times must we say it? Pedophilia and bestiality are problems because of consent, and the inability to obtain informed consent from the other participants. Lack of informed enthusiastic consent is the core and only factor that makes it acceptable for society as a whole to frown upon any sexual activity, in my view. And the reason that it’s harmful to children to have sex with them, even if they think they’re mature enough to handle the repercussions and think they’re consenting, is that psychologically, most of the time, they’re not.

The only reason these preachers and evangelists and homophobes go to that well is because they know that people (rightly) frown upon bestiality and pedophilia, and they involve sexual acts that are not part of “normal sex education”, and so are taboo. The parallels are drawn along taboo-sex and sex shaming lines, but the parallels fail on the one test that actually matters about those acts.

Paul Cameron: "Gays more likely to have sex with kids and animals, according to survey produced by My Rectum"

Saw nothing at all like this on my flight to Minneapolis

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 3 Comments

They didn’t seat me in row 666, there were no pamphlets on salvation, and the seats — cramped though they were — were a hell of a lot more comfortable than those pews look. And frankly, the pilot’s rapping wasn’t nearly good enough to cause the spontaneous generation of breakdancing angels.

Via Everything Is Terrible, where they know their quality whargarbl.

Saw nothing at all like this on my flight to Minneapolis

Sophia Investigates The Good News Club

Jason Thibeault, , , 17 Comments

Still not a lot of time to spread around. However, I did have enough time during work today to listen at least to this documentary. And damn but it’s scary.

Indoctrinating youth before they have a chance to start questioning this nonsense is obviously the best way to ensure you create life-long believers. If you wait until people are capable of rationality, they don’t swallow this nonsense as readily.

And yet, I was indoctrinated into Catholicism, and broke free despite these odds. Hooray for me. But I can’t help but think back on it and realize, there was very nearly zero difference between me and my friends intellectually at the time. It was, as far as I can tell today, sheer chance that I broke free — that I thought of the contradictions inherent in religions to plant the seeds of doubt unbidden. I am terrified for the prospects of the next generation with entire programs dedicated to indoctrinating children like this.

Via Christian Nightmares.

Sophia Investigates The Good News Club

Pat Robertson: watch out for demons attached to secondhand goods!

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , 21 Comments

Sorry again that I’ve been so silent — gigantic things are afoot in my life at the moment and it’s all I can do to keep myself from being plowed under. I’ll tell you all about ’em as soon as I can.

Pat Robertson has some helpful advice for those of you who have to buy items from thrift stores and Goodwill (wait… buying items from Goodwill? We’re not talking about the Salvation Army perchance, are we???). That advice is — you should rebuke them all before bringing them into your household in case there are demons attached to them.

Of course, buying things directly from a retail store drastically lowers your chances of getting a stray demon. You never know what kinds of demons might manifest in that pair of shoes you picked up from the thrift store, whereas with buying directly from retail, the chances are you’re only risking exposure to Mammon. So be careful when you sell all your possessions to buy a sword — that sword might be inhabited by an emissary from Hell!

Figures that the One Percent has a lower chance of getting attacked by demons. They get all the juiciest privileges, don’t they?

Pat Robertson: watch out for demons attached to secondhand goods!

Rick Scarborough: "Calling Sodomites 'gay' is an abuse of the language"

Jason Thibeault, , , , 21 Comments

Sodomy is a pejorative term for the act of putting your penis into someone’s anus. It was so named by religious Christians after the Bible story of the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. You’ll remember this is the town where Lot protected some visiting (male) angels from a roaming (male) rape gang by offering them his daughters instead — an act that God deemed to be morally pure enough to spare Lot and his family from the coming destruction, back when God’s aim was better and he was actually capable of punishing gays directly instead of via natural disasters to unrelated areas of the world.

Sodomy was, until very recently, illegal throughout most of the United States — though, it was often defined very broadly, so as to also cover any other acts deemed “icky” by the people in power, which might include oral sex or sex with someone outside of marriage. The last laws were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003. In a testament to how fundamentally backward religion forces humanity to act with regard to sexuality, regardless of whether the people in question acted with informed consent, the very act of putting dick in ass was illegal.

However, because the construct was almost entirely built as an assault on homosexuality, it was mostly only enforced when both practitioners were male.

Here in 2013, ten years after sodomy laws were struck down in toto, Pastor Rick Scarborough laments the “abuse of language” that is calling homosexuals anything other than People Who Put Dick In Ass.

Never mind that there are so many other sex acts that gay men could engage in, and that men aren’t the only ones capable of being gay. Never mind that use of the word “gay” is the end result of the retaking of a slur against homosexuals. Never mind that the word “sodomy” was either very tightly defined or so loosely defined as to be completely useless.

Continue reading “Rick Scarborough: "Calling Sodomites 'gay' is an abuse of the language"” →

Rick Scarborough: "Calling Sodomites 'gay' is an abuse of the language"