Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Rights, religion and cockroaches

Even if you're not a criminal, you probably know that a good way to pull off a heist is to create a distraction. Plainly, when nature or circumstances provide one, the slight of hand artists, the flim-flammers and fast fingered scammers; the looters and pillagers come out of the woodwork like roaches -- and so do the Christianists.

No, it's not just the nutjobs with sandwich boards yelling about the end of the world, it's the politicians and preachers and the "crossover" models as they say in Detroit. Sure, the argument for the apocalypse seems better every day, but that's never enough satisfaction for God's own nihilists. They have to make sure we're all either under strict control, or lined up like ducks for the Jeezimator to come and blow us all away.

Take South Carolina State Senator Robert Ford. He is trying to get a bill banning profanity passed that would make it a felony to utter certain unspecified words and which would carry a five year maximum sentence. The push goes on and is probably advancing, to convince us all that the Constitution was really founded on the Bible so Christianity should be the State Religion and while we still haven't retrieved the civil rights the last Republican Administration took away, the State of North Dakota is trying to grant them to any fertilized human egg cell. That's right, "any organism with the genome of homo sapiens" according to the bill, is a person and a citizen. As far as I can tell, King Tut's mummy is an organism with a human genome, but he doesn't live in North Dakota where all that treasure would have to be given back to him.

"This is very simply defining when life begins, and giving that life some protections under our Constitution — the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"
says the bill's sponsor, Rep. Dan Ruby. I wonder why swearing isn't my right, but I don't have to tell you he's a Republican and I shouldn't have to tell you he's a moron either, since the Constitution says no such thing, those words being the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

I shouldn't have to tell you, unless you were educated in some remote jungle, that both the zygotes involved in fertilization were already alive and that in fact, human life exists in an unbroken line back to some microbe or proto-microbe that lived back before the Pre-Cambrian. I shouldn't have to tell you either, that the Bible; the same Bible these same folks tell you is the basis for our laws, contains no such prohibition but rather asserts that life begins with breath. Even the Biblical word n'shemah is deliberately mistranslated as "soul" by Christians which is really what the right-to-life scammers want to protect. It really means "breath."

It takes a certain kind of mind to look at this picture and see a "baby;" an organism capable of thought, action or even life outside of another human body that has more rights for instance than someone who is accused of being an "enemy combatant" by an unreliable source. It takes a certain kind of person to brag about our freedom while wanting to take it away for using the anglo-saxon word for feces. It takes a certain kind of person to read the angry denunciations of Christianity by James Madison and Tom Jefferson and call them devout fundamentalist Christians.

So when someone bumps you in a crowd, or there's a commotion in a busy street or when the economy is collapsing all around you, keep your eyes open, your hand on your wallet and maybe your finger on the trigger. Yes, they are out to get you.

5 comments:

rockync said...

"It takes a certain kind of mind to look at this picture and see a "baby;""

And when there is a spontaneous abortion (the MEDICAL term for a miscarriage), while it may be devastating to the prospective parents, do they have a funeral and burial?

Joe "Truth 101" Kelly said...

I've seen uglier babies than that Captain.
I also see people that circumstances make them have to make a difficult decision.

Capt. Fogg said...

No doubt it's a very difficult decision, but this law is so vague that a sperm cell or an unfertilized egg are considered human beings. The white cells in your body are organisms with a complete human genome.

The keep howling about "when life begins" because the question never has been about when life begins: it's about when microbes can be considered to have sufficient human properties to be considered human.

These people aren't sane or intelligent enough to deliberate such questions, so they turn to insane certainties and try to force them on to the rest of us.

RR said...

These people aren't sane or intelligent enough to deliberate such questions, so they turn to insane certainties and try to force them on to the rest of us.

That's the problem.

The people and the press take these ignorant ass-holes - who happen to have a loud voice - seriously.

Maybe we should just start giggling when they speak instead of trying to reason with them. That's about the level of argument that could possibly be effective.

Capt. Fogg said...

The press and many of us are afraid to challenge religious "authorities"
even when what they say is utterly ridiculous -- which, as a rule, it is.