I posted the message below in the ExChristian website today: 11/6/09 and thought that I would post it here as well. Especially since I’ve been particularly lazy about posting lately.

From one INTJ to another – your story fits our shared type very well.

The reason that I cannot be apathetic about theism is, among other things, that so much hatefulness is involved in most of the monotheism of the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (in order of invention). A year or two or so ago there was this great interfaith meeting in Jerusalem. Jews, Muslims and Christians – leadership from each group – got together, broke bread, shook hands and had a great ecumenical meeting. What was the purpose of this meeting? It was to spew mutually agreed upon hatred for the GLBT community of Israel which was planning a Gay Pride Day and parade in Jerusalem.

Yup!! That is something that will bring all of those miserable hypocrites together – something they can all hate with one voice and with multiple acts. No!! Atheists, humanists, non-theists and lovers of humanity and the Earth itself can not afford to be silent in the face of the depredations of religion. If we let them have their way they would still – oops they are – be killing one another over versions of deities, creeds and other sorts of superstitious nonsense that is religion. They would still have nations designated as one religion only – oops – they’re still there. Take Saudi Arabia as a good miserable example. There can be no other religious organization or building except Muslim in that nation. It spreads its hateful message by teaching Wahabism (a particularly nasty bit of fundie Islam) with OUR OIL DOLLARS.

No we cannot afford to be silent in the face of the monstrous evil that is monotheistic religion.

Today (10/26/09) in Alternet.org there is an article that should send chills down the spine of every person who believes in individual freedom and in real democracy rather than the phony and cheap imitation that we have in the United States of America. Today’s USA, following the plutocratic inspirations of the Founders, has become less a plutocracy and more of a true fascist state. It is a state marked by blatant racism, though buried by many and erupting now in vile and violent demonstrations by white people against anything that the current black POUSA stands behind.

 The article from Alternet.org reveals the profound corruption that exists in the state and in particular in the so called criminal justice system. This corruption is part and parcel of any state no matter what its aspirations or grandiose statements to the contrary.

 The state is an inherent evil because it takes the power that belongs to the individual and claims it for itself. When the state becomes married to the corporation – a blatantly authoritarian structure – fascism is the inevitable result. Regardless of protestations to the contrary, democracy becomes a shell game controlled by the rich and powerful and the corporations they own. The people are left with the option to vote or not, it really makes little difference, for one of the candidates already stamped with the approval of the rich and powerful.

 The last presidential election in the USA was perhaps the most revealing of all that I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. Barack Obama ran as the great hope for the reversal of the fascist agenda embraced by the Republican Party and the Bush/Cheney crime family that best represented that perverse and evil mix.

 It is now nearly November of Obama’s first year in office. So far he has not only not fulfilled his promise to end the illegal and immoral treatment of prisoners held without trial for as much as 5 years in Guantanamo, Cuba. He is indicated that there will be a military “presence” in Iraq for an indefinite future. He has heightened the war of occupation in Afghanistan and expanded that war into Pakistan. The only issue that he has done anything with is a feeble attempt to get some sort of health care reform. However even there he has made secret deals with the pharmaceutical companies and backed off from strong public support for a real universal health care system.

 Why? Well the answer isn’t hard to figure out. One only need look at the corporations that funded his triumph at the polls to know whose interests he has at heart.

 The fact is that the man in the White House is like the Wizard of Oz, you have to look behind the curtain to understand who it is that really runs the nation and in whose interest it is being run.

 More to come.

Indeed most of the people one finds on TBN or any of the other channels devoted to superstition, ignorance and deistic nonsense can be called charlatans because that is in fact what they are. However there are many who are little more than predators who exploit the fear that is part of the human condition; fear of extinction – fear of death.

 This article is a good example of the lethal trickery that is promoted by these religious programmers. The doctor, Dr. Christine Daniel, who used her connections to the Pentecostal superstition, as an ordained charlatan, to make more than a million dollars selling a concoction of some sort that purported to cure cancer, among other illnesses. That coupled with prayers to a non-existent deity would get you on the road to recovery – at no small price. At prices ranging from $3,000 to many thousands, her prey died miserable deaths thanks to the witch doctor concoctions and prayers.

 Not only should this “doctor” be prosecuted for murder, but the TBN should be prosecuted for aiding and abetting in homicide. It is time to stop the perpetration of fraud by religious entities and individuals. It is time to stop treating religion and religious institutions as if they were exceptions to the rules about honesty and integrity.

The Bible is a fountain of vitriol, murder, genocide and mayhem all blessed if not absolutely commanded by the god of the Jews and Christians. So when Pastor Stephen Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church of Tempe Arizona spews his hatred for gay people, he is in fact being faithful to the Bible. Below is a sample taken directly from this miserable man’s sermons:

“The same God who instituted the death penalty for murders is the same god who instituted the death penalty for rapists and for homosexuals, sodomites and queers!

That’s what it was instituted for, okay? That’s God, he hasn’t changed. Oh, God doesn’t feel that way in the New Testament … God never “felt” anything about it, he commanded it and said they should be taken out and killed.

You know why God wanted the sodomites in the Old Testament to be killed? You know why every good king of Israel, the Bible says they got rid of the sodomites in the land? You know, the good kings that came after the bad kings who had allowed the sodomites to infest their land, they had infiltrated … King Asa got the sodomites out of the land, Jehoshaphat exterminated the sodomites that were left from the days of his father, Asa. Why? Because the sodomites are infectious, that’s why. Because they’re not reproducers, that goes without saying, they’re recruiters.

How are they multiplying? Do you not see that they’re multiplying? Are you that blind? Have you noticed that there’s more than there were last year and the year before, and the year before that? How are they multiplying? They’re reproducing right? No, here’s a biology lesson: they’re not reproducers, they’re recruiters! And you know who they’re after? Your children. Remember you dropped off your kids last week? That’s who they’re after. You drop them off at some daycare, you drop them off at some school somewhere, you don’t know where they’re at. I’ll tell you where they’re at: they’re being recruited by the sodomites. They’re being molested by the sodomites. I can tell you so many stories about people that I know being molested and recruited by the sodomites.

They recruit through rape. They recruit through molestation. They recruit through violation. They are infecting our society. They are spreading their disease. It’s not a physical disease, it’s a sin disease, it’s a wicked, filthy sin disease and it’s spreading on a rampage. Can’t you see that it’s spreading on a rampage? I mean, can you not see that? Can you not see that it’s just exploding in growth? Why? Because each sodomite recruits far more than one other sodomite because his whole life is about recruiting other sodomites, his whole life is about violating and hurting people and molesting ‘em.”

This little murderous religious thug is in fact preaching directly from the Bible and when he says that his god demands the death of homosexual men, he is right. It does indeed say exactly that; “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Leviticus 18:22; further on this blessed (right!) book says: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.” Leviticus 20:13

Of course good Jewish and Christian parents have the duty to murder their disobedient children – especially their sons:” They shall say to the elders of his town, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel will hear, and be afraid.” Deuteronomy 21:20-21 What a picnic. Everyone can get together on the town square and stone the kid to death. Bring a lunch and some wine and make a day of it.

You might suggest that Jews and Christians don’t do this any more. For the most part I suspect they don’t. However, some of the loonier of the Christian sects have decided that they can kill their kids in the process of driving demons out of them. Muslims, however, cheerfully murder women by stoning for wearing lipstick or not wearing sleeves that cover their wrists or let their hair show. So we still have a deity derived at least in part from the Jews and their scripture that takes great delight in blood and murder and mayhem on a global scale.

One more word about Pastor Anderson, servant of Satan if there ever was one – either a Satan or a servant of such an imaginary creature! You can read more about this murderous lunatic here, and even listen to the little monster rant and rave about gays and about President Obama, whom he appears to hate even more than gay people. Guess he is an equal opportunity hater. Bless his little religious thug heart.

My conclusion is that the best god is a dead god. Let us have neither gods nor masters to rule over us.

In the current edition of Talk to Action, a web site dedicated to exposing the constant work of the right wing Christian lunatics; there is a fairly good article on “The Family” an organization that is another form of Christian Dominionism – a movement that would like to see the return of the barbaric codes of Jewish/Christian scripture. A code which is pretty close to the barbarism of Sharia Law that the Muslims would like to see imposed on the whole world. (The reference I’m using is definitely opposed to Sharia Law, because I’m opposed to any law that is based on the fictions of religious nonsense and documents claiming to be the revelations of imaginary beings – gods.)

Much of the material in this article is from a series of shows by Rachel Maddow, undoubtedly one of the most brilliant media commentators on TV bar none. She leaves the morons and imbeciles like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and the certifiably insane Glenn Beck of FOX, Rupert Murdock’s abortion of an attempt at TV news.

The Family as an organization is one of the most corrupting of democracy that exists in this country today. It makes the imperialist oriented Roman Catholic Church look like little more than a stage for old misogynist males to run around wearing fancy dresses and jewels without being teased as drag queens. The Family is based on the concept that if you are doing their god’s work, then no matter what you do that people outside The Family might think, you are blessed as one of your god’s chosen.

One of the Biblical Examples that they use is King David, one nasty piece of work if there ever was one. Of course that’s not how the Bible likes to tell the story, but read the episode with Bathsheba and her husband Uriah the Hittite. David, most likely if he ever did exist little more than a tribal thug who murdered his opponents, deliberately has Uriah left alone on the battle field so that he can be killed in battle. All this so that the murderous little thug, King David, can screw her brains out! All of this does get David punished, but not in any ordinary just way – that is tried, convicted and either killed or sent to prison. Oh! Not David. His god, just as nasty a piece of work as David (no wonder they got on so well) kills the baby that is the fruit of his and Bathsheba’s illicit relationship.

What the point is for The Family is that if you are favored by this miserable wretch of a deity, you can do anything that you please, as long as you are working to destroy democracy and freedom to bring in the Dominion of this god about.. This is the reason that the moral pigs flock to this religious Family. As long as the Family approves their work for this nasty deity, it doesn’t make any difference what else they do in their lives.

The Mark Sanford and the John Ensign scandals of recent memory are tied directly to the duplicitous nature of this organization.

It is for these and many other reasons that my religious slogan has become

NO GODS AND NO MASTERS

A Friend of mine recently asked me to come up with labels other than gay or straight for homosexual and heterosexual people. This is my response:

 Here’s my thinking on this issue.

 Labels for human beings are dangerous, divisive and ultimately destructive.

 We are all human beings and that is the only label that counts. While male and female may have some useful functions as labels, history is replete with the damages done to females by males because of the categories indicating division by sex. The Bible alone stands as a terrible example of the evils done in the name of maleness taken to mean made in the image of a god while females are derivative of males and thus not in the image of gods but in the image of males; And generally considered a defective and debased image of males at that. The entire Old Testament is a testimony to the results of making distinctions that are based on prejudice, ignorance, superstition and patriarchal pretensions.

 Two sets of labels that today cause more misery and suffering and evil than any natural causes such as earth quakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and tornadoes and volcanoes all combined are those of nations and religions.

 There is absolutely nothing in the history of the world that has caused more murder, mayhem and devastation than religions warring against one another and warring within themselves. Immediately after this form of devastation and moral evil is the nation state. The wars of various nations for land and resources and for the sake of the spread of their empires have caused evil and suffering to human beings on scales that rose to a fever pitch in the 20th century in WW I and WW II.

In WW I the British Empire alone lost 1/3 of all men between the ages of 18 and 40, and that doesn’t even count the number, in the millions, of non-combatants killed. In WW II in Europe alone 30 million people were killed directly and millions more died as a result of starvation and injuries suffered.

 Every week, in my signature block below (see below), I publish the names of the young and not so young Americans who have been slaughtered in the name of the American Empire and its quest for world domination. My desire is that this is something that I can stop doing because the slaughter has stopped.

 All this for labels!  Right now people continue to be slaughtered in Afghanistan and Iraq for labels and lies, while the real reasons for these occupations and continued violence have labels like: religion, democracy, freedom, religious rights – none of which mean anything to the dead for which these acts of slaughter in the name of a label have deprived them of their lives – and there is no other life than this one except in the wild imaginings of religious dogmas, doctrines and the fog of illusion that they create and perpetrate.

 Stop with the labels. There is only one label that counts for all of us – human being. Every other label that we care to apply to each other ends up causing misery, sorrow, murder and horrors stacked end on end.

 This may not be the answer you were looking for, Ms. X, but this is my response.

 Feel free to pass it along.

This is from my signature block referred to above for the week ending 8/16/09

And the slaughter of the young for oil and empire continues.
For the week ending August 16, 2009

Marine Cpt Matthew C Freeman, 29, of Richmond Hill, GA
Army SSG Tara J Smith, 33, of Nashville, NC
Army SPC Matthew K S Swanson, 20, of Lake Forest, CA
Army SGT Jerry R Evans Jr, 23, of Eufaula, AL
Marine LCpl Dennis J Burrow, 23, of Naples, FL
Marine LCpl Javier Olvera, 20, of Palmdale, CA
Marine LCpl Patrick W Schimmel, 21, of Winfield, MO
Army SPC Richard A Walters Jr, 41, of Cleveland, OH
Marine LCpl Bruce E Ferrell, 21, of Perdido, AL
Army CPT John Tinsley, 28, of Tallahassee, FL
Marine Sgt William J Cahir, 40, of Washington DC

Most people know about the wolf in sheep’s clothing hoping against hope that the sheep will not notice that the wooly exterior is a little loose and the face a little elongated and the position of incisors (fangs) make this critter very likely not a grazing animal.

 

 

Much the same trick is being played by people, who have started an organization that claims to be “The Third Way”, that is a way of moderation on the “progressive” side of religion in the USA. Here is a rather lengthy article from the internet publication called “Talk to Action: Reclaiming Citizenship, History and Faith”

 It turns out that this organization has on its board some of the most rabid homophobes and haters of people not like themselves in the country. They hide not only behind their so called religious values but play on racial themes in order to turn their religious swamp into a real cesspool of vituperation and evil. Just listen to this hate filled speech by this rabid, angry person who pretends to be preaching the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. Humbug. He wouldn’t know it if he could hear it. His religion, called Christian, dumped Jesus and his teachings in the 4^th century and has never looked back. Listen to this and see if you can hear anything that might come from Jesus.

 

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all corrupt and the only thing we need to do is bury them as the relics of  a tragic past in human history so that we can get on with being the single human species we are and learn to care for one another on that basis and that basis alone; to care for the only world or place we have ever lived or ever will live – this Earth.

 Don’t separate church and state! Abolish them both.

Warning the video in this post is graphic and very violent. It is the result of religious driven violence – something that still contaminates the world we live in.

 This particular video (parts one and two) are what happens to women all over the Middle East where one of the most violent of all religions holds sway – Islam. It was born in violence, it propagated by violence, and violence is as embedded in the thinking of Islamic scholars as is salvation by violence in Christianity and the acquisition of land by violence in Judaism. For the Jewish record of violence you should start with the Hebrew Scripture, known to Christians as the Old Testament, and then jump to the treatment of the Palestinian people today. For Christian violence – well just examine the history of violence by the Imperialized Church after Constantine in the fourth century. While you’re at it pay particular attention to the 16century period called the Reformation when Christians relaxed most of the violence directed outside to slaughtering, torturing and murdering their own for various nonsensical ideas about god.

 All this is in the service of the fact that I do not consider Islamic violence a departure from the Judeo-Christian thread of religious history – it is simply the latest and one of the nastier versions of what has been a plague on humankind since the invention of gods and organized religion.

 Having said all that, here are the videos. Again a word of caution! These are not Hollywood movies – this is the actual murder of a 17 year old girl for ugly religious reasons.

In this hilarious article from today’s Crooks and Liars blog we come upon an appropriate reflection on the fraudulent and charlatan type operations of the Christian religious right.

 It seems that Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola Florida, (the state where I now live and which has more religious nutters than gators, snakes and roaches put together) will shortly be in the hands of the godless government. Kent Hovind, creator of this massive tribute to the human capacity to produce fantasy and pretend it is reality, has been a very naughty boy. He has not only left unpaid employee income taxes but has threatened government agents who’ve investigated his absurd and fraudulent operation.

 He claims that god was his employer and thus he does not have to pay taxes since, presumably, the income is actually god’s income and gods just don’t have to pay local taxes given the vastness of their responsibilities and expenses. I agree with the author of the piece in Crooks and Liars that it is probably time to call in the power of the latest deity on the scene in at least the USA, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, flavorful creator of all that is tasty and various and sundry other things.

 May you always have an abundance of spaghetti…..

 

This is a good place to start. These are a short introduction to the maniacal rantings of Pastor John Hagee, who, among other things, believes that Hitler was a half-breed Jew, a descendant of Esau. In his own words “Adolf Hitler was a distant descendant of Esau.”

 Pastor Hagee is the man who started the organization called Christians United for Israel. Now this sounds like a pro-Israeli organization. In fact it has sent tens of thousands of dollars to Israel for various projects. Beneath the pro-Israel stance however lies a deep bedrock of anti-Semitism (along with anti Catholic, anti gay, and a long list of hated people who receive the scorn of this teacher of love and enlightenment).

 The authentic reason for Hagee’s “love” of Israel is to get the Israelis strong enough with the help of Christian money, to start a war that will bring on Armageddon. When that war comes, one of the results will be that all Jews who haven’t converted to Hagee’s pernicious and perverse brand of Christianity will be swimming in a lake of fire for all eternity. Such love!! And such a loving Jesus!! Wow.

 Of course we have to remember that for all of the love your neighbor and pray for those who persecute you type of stuff that Jesus may have said, the last chapter of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation or the Apocalypse, negates the kind and loving Jesus and turns him into just one more angry vengeful murderous deity not unlike Shiva on a bad day. Shiva is another god that can be either beneficent or a real bastard. Not unlike YHWH or Allah.