loresjoberg
When all you have is a hammer, a nail, and 95 theses, everything looks like a church door.
February 6, 2010
Tweet of the day
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January 12, 2010
Islam4UK to be banned?
The BBC reports that the group Islam4UK will be banned under the Terrorism Act:
A radical Islamist group that planned a march through Wootton Bassett will be banned under counter-terrorism laws, Home Secretary Alan Johnson has said.
Islam4UK had planned the protest at the Wiltshire town to honour Muslims killed in the Afghanistan conflict.
The government had been considering outlawing the group — Islam4UK is also known as al-Muhajiroun.
A spokesman for Islam4UK told the BBC it was an “ideological and political organisation”, and not a violent one.
Mr Johnson said: “I have today laid an order which will proscribe al-Muhajiroun, Islam4UK, and a number of the other names the organisation goes by.
The strength of the government’s move may be judged by the next statement in the report: “It is already proscribed under two other names — al-Ghurabaa and The Saved Sect.”
So, Islam4UK will be “banned” . . . in the sense that the organization has to come up with another alias, but the group itself will suffer no other hardship? Perhaps I’m missing the point of this little exercise.
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January 6, 2010
I didn’t think that was what “tolerance” was supposed to mean
Rondi Adamson posted an interesting Martin Amis quote:
I just transcribed and edited a speech Martin Amis gave in Toronto recently. The whole thing was wonderful, but this — about Islamic fascism — was the best line:
I have to take my hat off to the left in that they have found something to defend in a movement that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitorial, imperialist and genocidal. Perhaps it’s their view on usury that is attractive to the left — low interest rates or non-existent interest rates.
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December 24, 2009
Atheist’s seasonal dilemmas
David Harsanyi looks at the plight of the non-believer during the Christmas season:
Unlike many of my fellow atheists, however, I’m not a fundamentalist on the issue of nonbelief. Though my rock-ribbed skepticism is, I hope, driven by reason, my unwavering desire to avoid saying “amen” in a group setting is a real driver, as well.
“Aren’t we forgetting the true meaning of Christmas?” Homer Simpson once asked. “You know, the birth of Santa.”
Like Homer, I enjoy the birthday of Jesus — or Santa. So it pains me to witness fellow atheists acting like a bunch of irritating ’80s televangelists and defeating the entire purpose of unbelief by organizing, grousing, wagging their fingers and, worst of all, proselytizing.
Take the billboards popping up in Las Vegas this year that read “Reason’s Greetings” and “Heathen’s Greetings.”
The man behind the billboards claims to only want to make people think — because only atheists can really think, after all. “People that drive by who have an open mind may think to themselves, ‘Maybe I should question some of my dogmatic beliefs,’ ” Richard Hermsen, a local atheist activist, explained.
Granted, atheists have some reason to be annoyed by the general public. A USA Today/Gallup Poll in 2007, for instance, found that more than half of Americans would, under no circumstances whatsoever, vote for an atheist.
No group fared lower than heathens. Not Mormons. Or even the Jews — and we probably killed Christ.
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December 22, 2009
Anglicans now allowed to shoplift
There’s updating your church to appeal to modern attitudes, and then there’s this:
Thou shall steal after all! Holy row greets fatherly advice from York vicar
Church of England priest Tim Jones preaches it’s OK to shoplift, though it’s best from a big retail company not family businessIn issuing the 10 commandments to Moses atop Mount Sinai, God was pretty unequivocal: “Thou shalt not steal.”
However, there’s good news for anyone whose passion for pilfering has hitherto been tempered by the eighth commandment: according to one Church of England vicar, we can steal after all.
Father Tim Jones, the parish priest of St Lawrence and St Hilda in York, told his congregation on Sunday that certain vulnerable people face difficult situations.
“My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift,” he said. “I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither.”
Well, that pretty much seals it, doesn’t it? Any other commandments we can dispense with — with the blessings of the Church of England?
December 9, 2009
QotD: Conservatives and God
I think what really offends me most about this sort of proclamation is the notion of the need for ‘unity’ rather than just a simple commonality of interests: if I am going to support someone politically, I am damned if I will to seek in that politician an additive “whole world view”. If Sarah Palin wants to trim the intrusive regulatory state, as she seem to want to do, well that is splendid, but I would rather not hear about how she thinks others need to include some anthropomorphic psychological guy-in-the-sky construct in their decision making processes.
Perhaps it is my English sensibilities but I am deeply suspicious of anyone who cannot keep their religious sentiments to themselves. I am willing to tolerate the religious views of others but, like most vices, religion is something best practised behind closed doors with other consenting adults as can be very unedifying when indulged in public.
Perry de Havilland, “Sigh . . .”, Samizdata, 2009-12-05
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November 17, 2009
QotD: Characteristics of death-squads
This is not at all a matter of the usual stupid refusal of the FBI and other security services to understand an early warning even when they have detected one. It is a direct challenge to the unity and integrity of the armed services, which have been one of our society’s principal organs and engines of ethnic and religious integration. A U.S. soldier who wonders about the reliability of his, let alone her, Muslim colleague is not being “Islamophobic.” (A phobia is an irrational or uncontrollable fear.) If Maj. Hasan has made this understandable worry in the ranks more widespread, he has done his fanatical preacher friend the greatest possible service. But that’s his fault for doing what he did, and his superiors’ fault for letting him openly rehearse it for so long, not mine for pointing it out.
I wrote some years ago that the three most salient characteristics of the Muslim death-squad type were self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. Surrounded as he was by fellow shrinks who were often very distressed by his menacing manner, Maj. Hasan managed to personify all three traits — with the theocratic rhetoric openly thrown in for good measure — and yet be treated even now as if the real word for him was troubled. Prepare to keep on meeting those three symptoms again, along with official attempts to oppose them only with therapy, if that. At least the holy warriors know they are committing suicide.
Christopher Hitchens, “Hard Evidence: Seven salient facts about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan”, Slate, 2009-11-16
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November 10, 2009
QotD: “It’s not that the FBI is merely incompetent”
You know the scariest thing about this? It’s not that the FBI is merely incompetent. It is that, apparently, so many American Muslims in sensitive positions make contact with Al Qaeda that the FBI is forced to conduct investigatory triage and evaluate whether, in their minds, the emails are merely innocent-for-now banter or something demanding a more urgent response.
Otherwise, why the blow-off? I don’t understand how the FBI could possibly deem any chatter with Al Qaeda harmless and not worth investigating unless so much of this was going on that they had decide which illegal chatter with a hot-war enemy was worth their limited let’s-take-a-looksie-at-this resources.
Ace, “FBI: Hassan’s Al Qaeda Emails Were Probably Just Some Research and Social Chatter and Stuff”, Ace of Spades, 2009-11-10
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November 4, 2009
Transsexual Jesus
A play in Glasgow is — all together now — “not intended to incite or offend anyone of any belief system”. In spite of that, some Christians are offended:
About 300 protesters held a candlelit protest outside a Glasgow theatre over the staging of a play which portrays Jesus as a transsexual.
The protest was held outside the Tron Theatre, where Jesus, Queen of Heaven — in which Christ is a transsexual woman — is being staged.
It is part of the Glasgay! arts festival, a celebration of Scotland’s gay, bi-sexual and transsexual culture.
Festival organisers said it had not intended to incite or offend anyone.
Of course, given the parlous state of Christianity in Britain, maybe they really did think that nobody would be offended. Portraying the founder of a different religion in this way might spark a bit more than protest.
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October 26, 2009
QotD: Neither full veritas nor much lux
Notwithstanding all this, The Cartoons That Shook the World is an informative read. But you won’t find the actual cartoons in it. There’s a cartoon mocking George W. Bush; there’s a death threat against the cartoonists. But Yale University Press refused to publish Klausen’s book as she submitted it — with the 12 Danish cartoons. Yale ordered her to remove the cartoons, citing unnamed “experts” who claimed the book “ran a serious risk of instigating violence.” Several American newspapers, like The Philadelphia Inquirer, published the cartoons without incident. Yale has had no actual threats, but it pre-emptively surrendered. If Klausen wanted to live up to Yale’s motto — “light and truth” — she would have done what the entire editorial staff of the New York Press did in 2006 when their publisher vetoed their reprinting of the cartoons: They resigned en masse.
Given Klausen’s burning derision for Fogh Rasmussen’s decision to stand for freedom, it’s no surprise she collapsed immediately herself, academic integrity be damned. Her surrender — and Yale’s — is not a detail but a central part of the story, for it is exactly the outcome desired by the Danish imams, the Saudi diplomats and their chorus of rioters.
Ezra Levant, “Review: The Cartoons that Shook the World, by Jytte Klausen Cartoon logic”, The Globe and Mail, 2009-10-24
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October 24, 2009
New cult
Lore Sjoberg has a new religion to offer:
There are many strange religions in this mixed-up, modern world — Discordianism, Pastafarianism, the Church of the Subgenius — but one of strangest and most popular is the Cult of the New.
People will pay more than twice as much to see a first-run movie compared to seeing it in a second-run theater or renting it and watching it at home. They’ll pay $50 for a videogame that will clearly be a $20 “greatest hits” game before too long.
They buy novels in hardback, comic books in their original run rather than waiting for the anthology. And then there are all those people paying $600 for video cards that, six months from now, will cost less than the shiny, full-bleed folding pamphlets currently being used to advertise the hardware.
It seems to me that the best way to instantly raise your standard of living is to live in the past. If you subsist entirely on two-year-old entertainment, and the corresponding two-year-old technology used to power it, you’re cutting your fun budget in half, freeing up that money for more exciting expenditures like parking meters and postage.
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October 23, 2009
When a poll goes very wrong
Lester Haines reports on a poll that didn’t go quite as the sponsors expected:
An online poll enquiring as to the possible existence of God has somewhat backfired on Christian outfit The Alpha Course, with 98 per cent of the popular vote currently saying he doesn’t:
According to the Sun, The Alpha Course kicked off a multi-million pound advertising campaign back in September to promote its particular road to enlightenment, described as “an opportunity for anyone to explore the Christian faith in a relaxed setting”.
The poster and ad drive was a response to a Humanist Society campaign last year suggesting there was “probably no God” – a view shared by the vast majority of the 154,500 online votes at time of publication.
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October 19, 2009
The American social contract
L. Neil Smith received some anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Iranian material recently. He tries to point out to the Christian who sent it to him that the United States was not intended to be a Christian country:
As I’ve testified often, I’ve known many Arabs, many Moslems, and more than a few Iranians, and found most of them to be extremely likeable, if not downright admirable people. What I see in my e-mail is an obvious product of ignorance and prejudice, and even worse, it fuels the evil machinations of the murderous warmongers in government.
Accordingly (with a few later additions), I wrote back to my correspondent:
We’ll all do better at getting rid of this administration if we face the truth, even if some of us find it unpleasant. This is not a Christian nation, nor was it ever intended to be. It was founded by a coalition of various Christians and deists (which is what atheists and agnostics back in the 18th century called themselves to avoid getting burned at the stake). It was bankrolled by a Jew, Haim Solomon. Look him up. None of this information is secret. It’s freely available to anybody who possesses the courage and integrity to click on Google or Wikipedia.
The deal between all of them is that religion would be separate from politics, that we would not make public policy on the basis of our mystical beliefs. Christians are trying to break that deal now, which is too bad. People in other nations, historically, have murdered each other over theological disputes. We have not, but we might start, if the Christians won’t stop welching on the bargain their ancestors made.
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October 16, 2009
October 7, 2009
QotD: The essence of religion
The fuel of every religion, one way or another, is guilt. Properly indoctrinated — generally from birth — a religious individual cannot eat, sleep, work, make love, or do much of anything else, either as a living organism in general, or a human being in particular, without automatically accumulating a burden of guilt that has to be discharged somehow from time to time, preferably (that is, preferably to those in the guilt-discharging industry) through the heavenly apparatus, sacred plumbing, and holy mechanics of whatever religion controls the territory.
Throw a nickel on the drum, save another drunken bum.
Churches are generally in the business of peddling forgiveness — for having done things nobody can avoid doing if they’re a living, physical creature. They’re middlemen between God and sinner (this means you). They may only want you to come to church on a regular basis, sing the songs, say the prayers, drop a quarter in the plate. Or they may want something else, your witness, your testimony, your speaking in “tongues”. In this hemisphere, once upon a time, climbing to the top of a pyramid and having your heart chopped out was highly encouraged.
L. Neil Smith, “Time for Another Another Reformation”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2009-10-04
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