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It’s Starting to Look Like Christie is Toast

Here it is: Crimes were probably committed.

Chris Christie Scandal Is An ‘Impeachable Offense’ If He Knew

“Using the George Washington Bridge, a public resource, to exact a political vendetta, is a crime,’ New Jersey Assemblyman John Wisniewski (D) said. ‘Having people use their official position to have a political game is a crime. So if those tie back to the governor in any way, it clearly becomes an impeachable offense.’ ”

Subpoenas are going out, including to the woman Christ Christie fired, former Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget Anne Kelly. If she makes a deal to testify, and says what we all think she’ll say, that Christie knew what was happening, Christie’s political career is OVER.

And he might just go to prison.

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Yeah, About That “Atheism as Intellectual Luxury” Thing

So … THIS got written: Atheism is an intellectual luxury for the wealthy

It starts with the writer’s Reasoning Guy bona fides. An atheist at 16, Chris Arnade sneered at religion, even later becoming an actual scientist.

Three years later I did escape my town, eventually receiving a PhD in physics, and then working on Wall Street for 20 years. A life devoted to rational thought, a life devoted to numbers and clever arguments.

During that time I counted myself an atheist and nodded in agreement as a wave of atheistic fervor swept out of the scientific community and into the media, led by Richard Dawkins.

I saw some of myself in him: quick with arguments, uneasy with emotions, comfortable with logic, able to look at any ideology or any thought process and expose the inconsistencies. We all picked on the Bible, a tome cobbled together over hundreds of years that provides so many inconsistencies. It is the skinny 85lb (35.6kg) weakling for anyone looking to flex their scientific muscles.

And then this man of science and reason started photographing homeless people. Talking to them, he discovered they were all strong in their religious faith. Takeesha, Sonya, Eric, Sarah, Michael — decades on the streets as addicts and prostitutes, they know that God is with them, watching over them, keeping them together when nothing else will. According to Arnade, every crack house — in addition to its “needles, caps, lighters and crack pipes” — contains a Bible.

In these last three years, out from behind my computers, I have been reminded that life is not rational and that everyone makes mistakes. Or, in Biblical terms, we are all sinners.

We are all sinners. On the streets the addicts, with their daily battles and proximity to death, have come to understand this viscerally. Many successful people don’t. Their sense of entitlement and emotional distance has numbed their understanding of our fallibility.

Yeah, about that.

I work peripherally with drug users and alcoholics, and I get to talk to a lot of them. Most of the ones I deal with are normal, everyday people who also happen to have this problem. Some are literal street people, hookers and hustlers and worse, others are family men and women with homes and careers. Some are even a bit upper crust, people flying high in life until they suffered auto or motorcycle accidents and got addicted to pain killers.

I’m always 100 percent careful to keep my opinions — of which I have few, because I know I have an 8-year-old’s knowledge of addiction, and I’m not qualified to draw conclusions with so little information — to myself.

But I’ve wondered more than once if this type of deep, deep faith has some direct connection to the addiction and hopelessness. If it’s not just another addiction, or at least an enabler of addiction. If multi-generational exposure to religious unreason, coupled with an equally senseless and abusive government approach to addiction, AND rehabilitation and treatment programs which perpetually emphasize the importance of religion, is what delivers families and individuals into these unimaginably harsh lives, cycling through years of drug use and rehab, drug use and rehab, on and on. I’ve wondered if people not taught to think, or taught NOT to think, are especially vulnerable. I strongly suspect they are.

But no, according to Arnade, this is all Richard Dawkins’ fault, that cold, inhuman, privileged sonofabitch.

I also see Richard Dawkins differently. I see him as a grown up version of that 16-year-old kid, proud of being smart, unable to understand why anyone would believe or think differently from himself. I see a person so removed from humanity and so removed from the ambiguity of life that he finds himself judging those who think differently.

I see someone doing what he claims to hate in others. Preaching from a selfish vantage point.

Judgmental pot, meet faith-based kettle.

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Atheist Christmas Present from William Lane Craig

Eye roll. Fox Snooze gives us William Lane Craig writing A Christmas gift for atheists – five reasons why God exists.

He starts out, annoyingly enough, with this:

For atheists, Christmas is a religious sham. For if God does not exist, then obviously Jesus’ birth cannot represent the incarnation of God in human history, which Christians celebrate at this time of year.

However, most atheists, in my experience, have no good reasons for their disbelief. Rather they’ve learned to simply repeat the slogan, “There’s no good evidence for God’s existence!”

I know that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 45 years or so. Because fuck thinking, right? Far easier to parrot what I’ve been told, repeating stock phrases, kneeling, singing hymns, counting the Rosary … oh, wait.

And by the way, the dismissive presentation of that “slogan”? It’s not exactly false, is it? There is no good evidence for the existence of a supernatural superbeing in the mold of the Christian God.

But then again, Christmas — the religious part of it, anyway — IS a religious sham, even to some Christians. Take this article from Good News, United Church of God’s online magazine: The Top 10 Reasons Why I Don’t Celebrate Christmas … some of which are: Christmas is nowhere mentioned in the Bible. Jesus wasn’t born on or near Dec. 25. The Christmas holiday is largely a recycled pagan celebration. And the cool one:  You can’t put Christ back into something He was never in.

But as a cultural celebration, Christmas is one of a category of fun mid-winter events (think Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and at least 32 other Winter Solstice celebrations). I have fond memories of it as a kid, and fond feelings for it now. Sham or not, we can celebrate the hell out of it. Christians don’t own it. Christmas is not an item, it’s something people DO. And you can do it however it suits you.

I tend to think of it as Krismas, named after Kris Kringle, and my Nativity Scene would probably have a baby Skettymon cooing cutely from a large colander, but hey, the sentiment of joy and togetherness is there.

Back to Craig and his 5 reasons:

1.  God provides the best explanation of the origin of the universe.
2.  God provides the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe.
3.  God provides the best explanation of objective moral values and duties.
4.  God provides the best explanation of the historical facts concerning Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
5.  God can be personally known and experienced.

I am not well equipped to argue physics, nor is William Lane Craig. Items 4 and 5 seem so irrelevant to anything real they’re not worth answering. But I can argue with Craig’s craptastic conclusions in point 3:

Even atheists recognize that some things, for example, the Holocaust, are objectively evil. But if atheism is true, what basis is there for the objectivity of the moral values we affirm? Evolution? Social conditioning? These factors may at best produce in us the subjective feeling that there are objective moral values and duties, but they do nothing to provide a basis for them. If human evolution had taken a different path, a very different set of moral feelings might have evolved. By contrast, God Himself serves as the paradigm of goodness, and His commandments constitute our moral duties. Thus, theism provides a better explanation of objective moral values and duties.

I doubt there are “objective” moral values. We’re sort of working our way toward it, aren’t we? Muddling along as best we can. For instance, we no longer care all that much about Exodus 20:4-6

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Arrogant puffery. Such a god would be unworthy of worship, or even admiration, and every person reading this knows it … in perfect opposition to what it says in the sourcebook of Christianity. We no longer believe such stuff because we’re better than the Bible. Because our morals, at least in some things, have progressed in the past few thousand years. So much so that even Christians are now forced to ignore large parts of their own sourcebook.

But this was puffery written by PEOPLE (rather than gods) — humans who sought to control other humans with slippery arguments, subtle misdirection, and blatant lies.

Just as William Lane Craig does:

The good thing is that atheists tend to be very passionate people and want to believe in something. If they would only put aside the slogans for a moment and reexamine their worldview in light of the best philosophical, scientific, and historical evidence we have today, then they, too, would find Christmas worth celebrating!

 

 

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God Crashes Train, Kills Four. Oh, wait …

This story caught my eye because it happened fairly close to a place in the Bronx I drive to every weekday.

New York’s subway system covers the city itself, but also extends itself about 75 miles north to Poughkeepsie. This part of it is called “Metro North,” and is a particular convenience to people who work in the city but choose to live a hour or so away in cheaper, safer towns.

That train derailed Sunday morning, injuring scores of people and killing four. Taking a 30-mph curve at 80 mph will do that for you. The investigation is ongoing.

For Daily Beast writer Michael Daly, one fascinating side-light of the story was the “humanity at its best” angle, where  non-critically-injured passengers, recruited by rescue workers, pitched in to help those more badly hurt.

Amazing Grace in the Bronx: Inside the Metro-North Train-Wreck Rescue

The better-off passengers applied gauze to the wounds of others and offered whatever aid and comfort they could as the firefighters attended to those who were most seriously injured.

It’s a touching and uplifting aspect of the tragic event, and I’m glad this part of it was told. The bulk of the story is about how helpful and cooperative everybody involved was.

The story goes off the rails (see what I did there?) in the last four paragraphs, descending into what I can only call blatant preaching. The human interest story ends, and the article shifts into goddy blather worthy of the Religion page:

The four dead from this Thanksgiving weekend wreck of 2013—who included a media consultant named Jim Lovell, on his way to help prepare the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center for the annual lighting—were a reminder that our most fundamental blessing, the gift of life, is forever subject to happenstance. You need only chance to sit in the wrong seat on the wrong train. A good many survivors afterward offered thanks to a higher power instead of simple blind luck.

“God is good!” exclaimed a 19-year-old college student.

“Thank God!” said the husband of a conductor.

If God is in goodness just as the devil is in evil, then God was indeed manifest in all those battered and shaken people who heeded the call from the firefighters to help somebody more injured than themselves. Ellson knew just what to call this kind of grace. “Amazing.”

I’ve come to expect nice Christians to thank God for all those times surgeons and paramedics, cops and firefighters  save their lives … but I doubt I will ever really get used to it. And I doubt I could ever respect a reporter who dons pulpit clothes in the middle of an otherwise factual story.

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Dying to Escape Hasidic Judaism

Tambor and Weiss

Generally I aim my verbal volleys at the Christian world, with the occasional whack at Islam. But this caught my attention after my recent riff on Hasidic Jews in Beta Culture: To Not Be Owned:

Outcast Mother’s Death, and Questions About Jewish Sect’s Sway Over Children

A women who left an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect committed suicide in September.

Ms. Tambor, 33, had forsaken the Hasidic Jewish world in which she was raised and married, a decision that undermined her relationship with her children. Her Skver Hasidic sect in Rockland County, N.Y., was concerned that Ms. Tambor’s freer lifestyle might be a subversive influence on the children, and whether it swayed the children to keep their distance and limited her opportunities to visit has become an emotionally charged question in wider Jewish circles.

Articles in The Forward, The Jewish Week and the online magazine Tablet and on blogs run by Hasidic defectors, like Failed Messiah, have detailed the agonizing challenges facing those who leave the insular world of Hasidim, where dress is austere, the language is Yiddish and religious obligations structure each day.

Former Hasidim seeking child custody arrangements find that rabbis, community leaders and Orthodox Jewish family therapists line up with money and witnesses behind the Hasidic spouse. Such influence is especially powerful in a place like Rockland, a county near New York City where one-third of the residents are Jewish.

Descriptions of her forced estrangement from her children are heartbreaking. Though her ex-husband refused to comment, the husband’s cousin laid her death off on mental issues somehow related an automobile accident.

“She became unbalanced,” said Mr. Melber, who is Hasidic. “Her husband tried everything in his power to hold things together. She started going in a bad direction. There was a feeling the kids are not safe with her because of mental issues.”

Okay, crazy woman. Right. Protect the children. And it might be so. But another wrinkle comes in when you follow the links.

Weiss, her live-in boyfriend, said her family had disavowed her earlier, when she told family members that she had been sexually abused by a member of the tight-knit New Square community as a child and they denied it.

Driven by her depression, Tambor checked herself into a psychiatric hospital, said Weiss, which is when family members in New Square moved to block her from seeing her children, who are now 11 and 13.

“Her depression started when she decided to leave the community and was threatened with losing her kids,” Weiss told The Forward. “Her biggest issue was that no one cared for her, everyone blew off all her issues.”

The sordid story ends with family members — apparently “shamed” by her taking her own life — denying Weiss and 40 of her other friends the right to attend her funeral. One of Tambor’s uncles even called the police in an attempt to force them to leave the area near the funeral home.

Finally, there’s an interesting light shed on the cultural community itself. Footsteps is an organization that assists those desiring to leave the ultraconservative community for the larger world. From the “Challenge” page — “Why is Footsteps Necessary?”:

“There is one particular gole that I want to achive. That gole, is getting a hier education. By a hier education, I mene going to college or university for sevrel years and excelling in the particular subjects that I think I’m good at” (Benny, 19).”

This is a 19-year-old AMERICAN, remember. From the Jewish cultural community, widely respected for its strong emphasis on education. Except in this case …

Ultra-Orthodox communities are insulated from the contemporary secular world and keep outside influences from challenging their basic beliefs or affecting their highly structured way of life. Education is carefully controlled — for boys it consists almost entirely of religious subjects. Girls are given a limited practical education and for many men and women Yiddish is their first language. Exposure to radio, television, movies, secular newspapers and literature of any kind is officially prohibited.

Footsteps aims to assist with  “educational, vocational and social support” for those escaping “the insular ultra-religious communities in which they were raised.” This bit, from their “About” page, is eye-opening (emphasis mine):

People from the ultra-orthodox and Chasidic communities who choose to enter mainstream America currently do so AS NEW IMMIGRANTS IN EVERY SENSE. They face cultural disorientation and isolation coupled with a lack of practical and marketable skills.

Finally, from the “funeral chaos” story: The village of New Square, Rockland County, NY, about 50 miles north of NYC (emphasis again mine) …

… is considered one of the most culturally isolated towns in America, with SEX-SEGREGATED streets and FEMALE RESIDENTS WHO, in obedience to the town’s rabbis, DO NOT DRIVE.

The “sex-segregated streets” bit apparently means women are required to walk on the opposite side of the street from men. Gah.

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Is Handling Poisonous Snakes a Constitutional Right?

Pentecostal Pastors Argue ‘Snake Handling’ Is Their Religious Right

Is it? I’m going to say yes, with certain reservations.

1) The snakes should be protected.

2) Anyone handling them should be experts licensed by the state in which the church exists.

3) The church offering the activity has to have insurance that covers accidents and liability — just as fireworks displays and rodeos have to have insurance — so that if the snakes escape, or if someone is injured or killed during the service or at any time when snakes are present, they’re covered.

4) The right should be an ordinary RIGHT, and not a religious right. No special favors for churches in the possession and handling of wildlife.

Other than that … I think this is a stupid practice, and the people doing it are complete fools. But hell, let ’em.

I’m going to suggest that if the practice is banned, or some of these nice people are prevented from “worshipping” as they wish, they go blackberry picking in East Texas. They’ll have plenty of chances to meet up with diamondback rattlers, and they can just grab up anything that slithers.

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Do Atheists Have the Right to Offend Muslims?

The question was posed in an article from The Muslim Times (which features such articles as A challenge for Dawkins: Where did carbon come from? and Conversion of Mr. Bean to Islam?)

Recently some atheists at the LSE Freshers day were asked by university authorities to remove T-shirts depicting the Prophets Jesus and Muhammad (peace be upon them both) sharing a beer together. Well, to be more exact, they were asked to remove “Jesus and Mo” cartoon t-shirts, where “Jesus” is depicted as a cartoon caricature of the real Prophet Jesus (peace be upon him) and “Mo” is ostensibly a ‘body double’ of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

Such conflicts are proliferating, and present an interesting challenge to our democratic society in the UK: do atheists have the right to offend Muslims?

On the face of it, this may seem a simple question, and most people probably will start reading this article with a fixed opinion on the issue. But it’s actually a rather complicated question!

That’s pretty much the meat of the article, and it trails off into a few more bland paragraphs. The author shies away from giving any suggestion of an answer, I suspect because reasonable people already know the answer: First, it’s the wrong question, and Second, when you ask the REAL question — “Do Muslims (or any other religious group) ever have the right to use ‘I’m offended!’ as a clinching argument to restrict the freedom of expression of others in public spaces”? — the answer is No, or at least, They Apparently Do But They Damned Well Shouldn’t.

The original incident was described on the website of the  National Secular Society:

A row over free expression has broken out at the London School of Economics after members of the LSESU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Student Society were told they would be physically removed from the annual Freshers’ Fair unless they covered up t-shirts deemed “offensive”.

The group’s response was right on target:

We reject in the strongest possible terms that by wearing a non-violent, non-racist t-shirt we would harass other students or create an “offensive environment”. We reject completely that we were not behaving in an “orderly or responsible manner”. In fact, when faced with the entirely unreasonable request to change or cover up our clothing, we remained calm and asked for clarification on what rules or regulations we were alleged to be in breach of. Even though we completely disagreed with the instructions of the LSE, we still complied, making clear that we would challenge this decision through the appropriate procedures.

As much as we respect and defend the rights of others to wear whatever they choose to wear, we claim this right for ourselves. Our right to free expression and participation in the LSE student community is being curtailed for no other reason than that we are expressing views that are not shared by others. The t-shirts worn are harmless satirical depictions of fictitious religious figures and certainly cannot be considered intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive to anyone by even the most stringent standards.”

The LSESU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Student Society is in the right here, and in the just world they’re working to create, the deeper question of freedom of expression — whether it involved Muslims or some other religious group — would never come up.

But in this case, a religious group complained of supposed intimidation and the university rolled over and REALLY intimidated this other, non-religious, group.

On a side note, The Muslim Times, which calls itself “A Blog to Foster Universal Brotherhood,” says on its About Us page:

We want to applaud the good writings of all the Muslims, the Christians, the Jews, the agnostics and the atheists and others, by sharing them with our readers.

So, hey, maybe I’ll be published on there someday.  Because they’re all over that brotherhood thing.

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Rare Giant Gemstone Sort of Wasted. Thanks, Religion.

I’m okay with Buddhists, generally. But guys, really? A statue of Buddha (there are a few around, in case you don’t know) was the best the human race could come up with for the largest single piece of jade ever discovered?

… a mammoth boulder of nephrite jade sourced in Northwest British Columbia, Canada. Dubbed the Polar Pride boulder when it was discovered in 2000, gem experts called the 18-ton specimen “the find of the millennium.”

I’ll admit I’m coming up short in figuring out what should have been done with it instead. My best imaginings include a carving of a black bear, or a family of river otters, realized in such a way as to convey an environmental message. But still …

The Polar Pride was split in two and sold for an undisclosed price to an international Buddhist organization headed by the Nepalese monk Lama Zopa Rinpoche. In 2006, the twin blocks were shipped from Vancouver to Thailand, where master craftsmen began their two-year labor of love – freeing the smiling, meditating figure of Buddha from an enormous block of gem-quality jade.

Buddha? That’s it?

To those who argue that Buddhism is not a religion, here’s at least one counter-argument. This bit is pure religion:

Rinpoche said that the statue made from the majestic boulder would illuminate the world and bring peace, happiness and solace and help prevent destruction, including war.

Yeah, I’m sure it’ll do that. Jade statues are known for their mystical, war-preventing powers.

More than that, though, you kinda have to assume the price was in the millions. I have a church a few blocks from my house valued at more than 7 million. I can never pass the thing without thinking of how many college degrees in medicine or environmental science the money would have financed. Ditto for this largest-ever jade Buddha statue.

Presented with a never-before-never-again opportunity, the best humans can come up with, once again, is religion.

Aw, heck.

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No, I don’t believe in God. I thought YOU did. Well, heck. Now what?

We’re born to sanity. We instinctively feel that things should be reasonable. That it should all MAKE SENSE.

Most of us, as we grow to adulthood, at least TRY to be sane and sensible. But we all know we share the world with some crazy-ass others.

In my view, the biggest reason for rampant craziness in the world is religion. Religion is not only mistaken about basic facts of reality, it sets up a social field of acceptance to casual lies, deliberate falsehoods, even malicious acts, by both the priestly and the pious.

Churches TEACH falsehoods, and they garb themselves in the appearance of the highest good as they do it.

Deliberately denied the tools that would help them critique church claims, credulous followers are set up to become victims of all the other liars and con men … who often don the same mantle of goodness. It creates an entire society where lies are easy, even expected, and where all manner of inglorious acts can be defended, because nobody really knows what’s right, what’s just, what’s good.

But even deeply immersed in the inner workings of churches, there are those who find they want sanity. Discovering eventually that they are too reasonable to believe, they reach the point where they either sacrifice honesty as the price of keeping their jobs and positions, or they quietly leave the career.

More than a decade into the new atheist movement, though, outspoken atheists have created a field of acceptance to non-belief great enough that it has lowered the barrier to admitting loss of faith, even to those IN the faith.

Church Pastors Become Atheists

More than 200 church leaders across the country now say they no longer believe in God, including a Houston-area pastor who was one of the first to publicly announce his decision.

Mike Aus, who was pastor at Theophilus church in Katy, Texas, went so far as to make an announcement on TV about his loss of faith, during an appearance on MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes Sunday morning show.

Aus was a long-time Lutheran pastor at churches in the Houston area, but now he said he no longer believes in the message he had been preaching for almost 20 years.

…

“As I started to jettison the beliefs, I came to realize fairly recently there wasn’t a whole lot left,” Aus said.

The effect was immediate on his church with about 80 members. Weeks after his announcement, the church dissolved. Members […] said their pastor’s complete change in faith was devastating.

I’m just wondering what happens when hundreds of millions of church members realize they’re not alone in wondering what the heck it is they’re doing, and why. Why they never “felt the presence of God,” or why prayer never felt real to them.

It starts to look like we’re building up to that point.

 

 

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Time to RICO the Catholic Church?

Here’s a Reuters article: Documents show Milwaukee archdiocese shielded pedophile priests

Someone correct me if I’m wrong here, but if someone commits a crime, and you act to help them hide that crime, doesn’t that make you an accomplice? Part of a conspiracy to evade justice?

The 6,000 pages of documents related to eight decades of abuse cases showed in great detail the Milwaukee archdiocese regularly reassigned priests who were accused of sexual molestation to new parishes …

Because that’s exactly what went on here.

Even more interesting is this:

One document is a letter that Dolan sent to the Vatican in June 2007 requesting permission to move $57 million into a cemetery trust fund in order to protect the funds from “any legal claim and liability.” The Vatican approved the transfer a month later, according to the documents.

So, knowing the money might be ordered paid as restitution to the victims, he acted to hide it, divert it, to a place where it couldn’t be reached. Sounds pretty conspiratorial to me.

I could easily be wrong about this, but if the Vatican is complicit in all this, how is it any different, legally, from the Mafia?

Is the Catholic Church a RICO — Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization?

I’d say yes.

—————————-

In Dolan’s defense,

The documents also showed that when Dolan, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the nation’s most prominent Roman Catholic official, asked the Vatican to remove priests, it was slow to respond.

… the Vatican took a glacial 6 years to remove a priest Dolan had earlier reported.

But considering that the Milwaukee diocese had an 80-year history of transferring molesting priests from place to place rather than removing them, it’s not all that comforting.