Tag: religious-right-are-wrong
News Chum O’ The Day
Some of the articles that have caught my eye in this morning’s perusal of the news:
- From the “Sitting Around The House” Department: A wonderful You Tube Video from Joy Nash, ranting on some of the fat haters of this world. Our society has been obsessing over obesity, and it has become one of the few things that folks think is acceptable to pick on. It isn’t.
- From the “Wooden Nickle” Department: Just imagine how this would play today: A president takes a bible, cuts it up, takes only the passages he likes, and makes a new bible. Discarded are every miracle and inconsistency in the New Testament. Betcha the religious right would rise up in protest at the blasphemy. But that’s just what Thomas Jefferson did. The result: The “Jefferson Bible”, a “wee little book” of 46 pages (even available online). Gotta admire those founding fathers.
- From the “Take it all off… well, maybe not so much…” Department: It seems a nude beach near San Onofre will have to cover up. It appears its gotten a bit too popular, and the locals are complaining. Angered naturists plan to fight back. Almost reminds one of a Monk episode.
- From the “He’ll Turn Over In His Tube” Department: Pringles aren’t potato chips, at least according to a British judge. Specifically, Pringles don’t fulfill the legal definition of “potato crisp.” This allows them to be sold tax-free in the UK. Under the law, most food is exempt from Britain’s 17.5% sales tax. Even so, the national tax office claimed that Pringles were covered by an exception for products such as potato chips, sticks or puffs “and similar products made from the potato, or from potato flour, or from potato starch.” Procter & Gamble’s lawyers argued at a May hearing that Pringles didn’t look like a chip, didn’t feel like a chip and didn’t taste like a chip, according to the judgment. I wonder if they really want that argument publicized…
P.S.: I’m still trying to figure out the best way to have LJ posts show up on a Facebook news feed (I only want public posts). I’m not sure if the RSS approach in the News section is best. Opinions?
Monday News Chum
Some interesting news articles of the day:
- From the “Religion and Science” Department: No, I’m not talking about “Expelled”, the Ben Stein movie about teaching creationism. No, it is a different religion this time that thinks it is the center of the world. A prominent Muslim cleric, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy, has said modern science had at last provided evidence that Mecca was the true centre of the Earth; proof, he said, of the greatness of the Muslim “qibla” – the Arabic word for the direction Muslims turn to when they pray. A Muslim geologist has argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca’s was in perfect alignment to magnetic north. As a result, Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, seeing GMT as British imposition on the rest of the world by force from when Britain was a big colonial power. Muslim scientists have also developed a Mecca watch, which is said to rotate anti-clockwise and is supposed to help Muslims determine the direction of Mecca from any point on Earth. This information came out of a meeting in Qatar, part of a popular trend in some Muslim societies of seeking to find Koranic precedents for modern science. The underlying belief is that scientific truths were also revealed in the Muslim holy book, and it is the work of scholars to unearth and publicise the textual evidence. Sound familiar?
[Tip o’the hat to patgund for bringing this to my attention.] - From the “Porn is Boring” Department: Turning from religion to porn, the Daily News has a very interesting interview with Larry Flynt in which he notes that (a) “nothing is more boring than pornography”, (b) “the Republicans are more fun”, (c) “[Cardinal Roger Mahoney] ought to be tarred and feathered”, and (d) “[what] some of the producers of porn are doing is they are giving the entire industry a bad reputation”. Highly recommended.
- From the “Catholics and Cats” Department: Continuing with our theme, it turns out Pope Benedict XVI is a cat lover. He has a lifelong love of cats, his biography was written by a cat (Chico, a ginger tabby who lives across the road from Benedict’s old house in Germany), and as Cardinal, when he was the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he tended to the cats that frequented the garden of the congregation’s building in the Vatican and bandaged their wounds. We do not know what Muslim Clerics think of cats.
Who Knew?
Christians parodying themselves. Who knew?
What Would FSM Do?
Evidently, the pastafarians are being given serious consideration at a religious conference.
Never Underestimate the True Believer
Sigh.
Creation Museum surpasses attendance expectations. Halfway into its first year, the Creation Museum is on the verge of surpassing its projected year-long attendance goal of 250,000. Officials now expect nearly 400,000 people to pass through the doors by year’s end. At least 10,000 people have paid for year-round access. The museum argues that the Bible’s book of Genesis is exactly how the world was formed — in six 24-hour days. Specifically, the museum’s exhibits claim that the Earth is 6,000 years old, not billions; that dinosaurs and man coexisted; and that geologic features such as the Grand Canyon and fossils were created in a global flood provoked by Adam’s and Eve’s original sin. Polls show that many Americans already agree with some of the museum’s claims. A 2006 CBS poll found that 51% of Americans think God created humans in their present form. Just 15% said that humans evolved and God was not involved.
P.S.: Of course, you all know about GodTube, the Christian YouTube.
The Value of Symbols, Take 2
A while back, I wrote a post about the value of symbols. It appears they are in the news again, this time politically.
We all know that the Conservative pundits pick interesting topics to (for lack of a better term) attack, especially when those attacks have the goal of showing a purported lack of patriotism or devotion to conservative values (neverminding the fact that conservatives don’t always live up to those values themselves). For a while, it looked like the target d’jour was going to be Obama’s Lapel Flag Pin (or lack thereof) — and that still may prove to be a problem (although I have no idea why). But today’s target, according to the Los Angeles Times is Google.
Specifically, the problem is Google’s logo. Those who use Google know that Google changes their logo on a regular basis to commemorate this, that, and the other thing. Their most recent logo change was last week, when the second “g” in Google was replaced with a drawing of the Soviet satellite, in order to commemorate the 50th launch of Sputnik. I’m sure you saw that story: it was everywhere: Time, Newsweek, etc.
Apparently, a conservative blogger is irked because Google will commemorate a Soviet event with a logo, but won’t do a special logo for something American like Memorial Day or Veterans Day (i.e., military remembrance days). But they are irked at Google anyway. According to the Times:
Conservatives have found plenty of reasons to complain about Google, which they see as a liberal enclave because of the corporate causes it champions and the political candidates its employees support.
The company, started in 1998 by two Stanford University graduate students, prides itself on progressive thinking. Google set up a $90-million foundation in 2005 to fund causes widely seen as liberal, including climate change and global public health.
What’s more, the company’s employees contribute overwhelmingly to Democratic candidates. While the company’s new political action committee has given nearly half of its $22,100 in contributions this year to Republicans, 93% of the $141,000 donated by individual employees went to Democrats, according to Federal Election Commission data provided by CQ Moneyline.
My feeling: Go Google! One doesn’t show patriotism by wearing in on your sleeve. It is not a lapel pin, a memorial day logo, flying the flag at your home, or putting an “America: Love It or Leave It” decal on your car that expresses your love for this country. It is fighting for what this country stands for: allowing all people to have a voice, to fight for freedom of expression, for the freedom to have a variety of ideas and contributions that serve to strengthen the political discourse. It is supporting those who fight to preserve those values through action and deed, not symbolism.
P.S.: I wonder if this blogger read the article on Sputnik in Newsweek that pointed out that America could have put a satellite in space first… but specifically chose not to. Allowing the Russkies to do it first furthered one of Eisenhower’s goals: a policy that would allow any nation to undertake aerial reconnaissance of any other. Eisenhower welcomed the launch because the Soviets could hardly deny the right to launch satellites over the territory of other countries if they did it first. This also gave us the competition to create the space program quickly (which we now know wasn’t good in the long run).
I Wonder If The Fundie’s Know About This?
According to the New York Times, chaplains in Federal prisons have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries. They are doing this under the direction of the Bureau of Prisons, which wants to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. Why are they doing this? According to Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, the agency is acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department that recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”
Specifically, Ms. Billingsley said, “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.” The Bureau of Prisons said it relied on experts to produce lists of up to 150 book titles and 150 multimedia resources for each of 20 religions or religious categories — everything from Bahaism to Yoruba. The lists will be expanded in October, and there will be occasional updates. What’s on the lists, you ask? There are nine titles by C. S. Lewis, for example, and none from the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal Avery Dulles, and the influential pastor Robert H. Schuller.
Who selects these titles? The identities have not been made public, but “they include chaplains and scholars in seminaries and at the American Academy of Religion”. This sounds as good as the folks that review movies. Further, the bureau has not provided additional money to prisons to buy the books on the lists, so in some prisons, after the shelves were cleared of books not on the lists, few remained.
Fascinating. But I guess this just makes it harder for inmates to “find God” and be redeemed. Serves them right.
Update – September 27, 2007: The prisons are restoring the removed books. Seems the fundies did find out about it.