Yer Heathen Laws

Today he shall be lifted up and tomorrow he shall not be found, because he is returned into his dust, and his thought is come to nothing.

-1 Macabees 2:63 -

It's no surprise that the nattering nabobs of nullification and true haters of the secular Constitution  are resisting the Supreme Court's latest ruling forbidding the Confederacy to ban some marriages on Christian grounds. I'm talking about Texas, but the Lone Star State is hardly alone.  It's a "lawless ruling" says Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and if clerks are fined for refusing to issue marriage licences, he will defend them in court.  Like many a snake of fable, he doesn't have a leg to stand on.

"God don't want me to obey yer heathen laws!"  I can't wait for that defense to show up in Federal Court, and just try to wrap your mind around that convoluted logic,  Not that it would be the first time we've heard it and who could be surprised if we don't start to hear that toothless old Rebel Yell again.
Mississippi, Attorney General Jim Hood says gay marriage won't be legal in the state until the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals gives the go-ahead. A court of Appeals? And here we thought the Supreme Court had the final say.

Bobby Jindal tells his constituents:

"I think it is wrong for the federal government to force Christian individuals, businesses, pastors, churches to participate in wedding ceremonies that violate our sincerely held religious beliefs, We have to stand up and fight for religious liberty. That's where this fight is going,"

That "fight" is going precisely nowhere of course since the government isn't forcing any church or Pastor or Priest or anyone else to do anything, and a county clerk is free to resign if he doesn't like his job, just as any Muslim, Jew or Hindu can decide not to work for McDonalds if he won't serve pork or beef.   Anyway I suspect "Fightin' Bobby" would look real good in his Rebel grey uniform fightin' for the Ol' South. I think the irony could be measured on the Richter Scale.

Those of us of a certain vintage will remember when these God forsaken blowhards made the same arguments about interracial marriage and racial integration as well, and George Wallace based a presidential candidacy on undoing integration, " 'cause God don't want the races to mix."  Then as now, their miserable religious rage and sexual obsession  has come to nothing, leaving them to thrash around like a catfish on a sandbank . That pleases me no end and when they complain that it's a violation of  our "Freedom"  for the state not to be controlled by some state-sanctioned religious doctrine, I'm more than amused to watch these stinking turds of history slowly swirling down the porcelain bowl of justice.

An embarrassment of witches

Yes,  many of us still think we can fix stupid with an embarrassment of regulations, but hey, there's one thing I've learned down here in the Cracker State is that you can't fix ignorance, hate, fear and superstition by kindness or firmness or cynicism or by embarrassing the practitioners thereof. People who like, who get rich on a society of serfs and barons don't want it fixed. If you're in the religion business, you sure as hell want a large reservoir of the downtrodden.

The town of Pahokee, Florida might be in Palm Beach County, but you'd hardly confuse affluent Palm Beach with this town of roughly 6000 people, almost as many churches, 12 billion mosquitoes and I don't know how many alligators. It's a sugar cane town and only an aging and unstable levee separates it from becoming the bottom of Lake Okeechobee once again.

Very little separates it from most rural South Florida towns. High crime, low income, high unemployment, low education and a hell of a lot of churches, both mainstream and esoteric; most of whom seem overly concerned with witches. Yes, I did say witches and in that respect, Pahokee seems to have much in common with far flung places like Wasilla, Alaska where a popular preacher and friend of Sarah Palin has bragged about killing such unfortunates in Africa.

The Lake Okeechobee Resort and Marina will, if all goes well,  host its first Lake Okeechobee Summer Solstice Festival on June 19-23. Now, recognizing the change of the Sun's apparent angle in the sky is more than geometry.  As every SwampChristian knows it's PAGAN and pagan means witchcraft, and witchcraft, both here and in pagan Papua New Guinea as a great danger to our moral, spiritual and actual health and the preachers of Pahokee ain't gonna stand for it, by God.

"An abomination" said Pastor Brad Smith, Florida Director of Kids for Christ.  “We don’t need this in our town. Not now. Not ever,” said Rev. Raul Rodriguez, of Church of God Door of Jesus Christ.“We cannot expect our city to survive and prosper if we allow these things,” said Pastor Eugene Babb, of Harlem Church of God. “God cannot heal our land if we have witches and warlocks violating our community,” said Evangelist Lillian Brown, of Saints on the Move. “We are opening ourselves up to things we should not, like belly dancing and magic spells,” said one citizen at a recent city commission meeting where protest against letting anyone express the most attenuated form of  religious freedom: abominations like belly dancing lessons.

So am I indulging in the same intolerant  thing by mocking the rubes, poking fun at Christians because I'm an atheist and think I'm superior to people who believe that occult incantations change nature and that tolerance of freedom risks having one dragged down to eternal torture by demons?

Not really. I'm mocking people who think it will ever be different, people that a free and liberal democracy is compatible with the culture that derives from and thrives on ignorance and superstition and hate, that tolerance of and indeed the support of such ignorance, poverty, disease and depravity is required by the mandates of "Smaller, less intrusive government."  I'm talking about the Republican base.

What will I be doing while witches shake their demonic bellies while the Devil beats the drum on the 21st?  If weather and witchcraft permit I'll be on Green Turtle Cay.  I mean who wants to be near Pahokee when the sky begins to fall.

"Those who wait on the Lord will soar on wings like eagles, and they will run and not be weary, and they will walk and not faint."

I don't have to look for evidence that the United States of America isn't united, unless you consider enraged confusion to be a uniting factor. A Pew polling report last year showed that only 34 percent of Americans think Obama is a Christian. I have no idea how many Americans like me, don't give a damn if he's a Zoroastrian as long as he keeps his scriptures under his pillow and not under mine. His religion or lack thereof is no more significant to me than his favorite basketball team and indeed the private beliefs of most of our better presidents have rarely been a factor in their official lives.

Of course those who wish to destabilize and polarize what's left of the informed electorate for reasons of partisan gain are happy to make an issue of it and for them it's indeed a game with few rules and only one strategy: attack, attack, attack. Prominent amongst that breed of snakes is of course, Fox News, who can depend on a base of religious chauvinists and racist bigots who know less about the certainties they profess than their enthusiasm might indicate.

Take the recently manufactured "scandal" about the inaccuracy of Obama's reading of Isaiah 40:31 at the National Prayer Breakfast this week. Fox Followers can't really be expected to know much about the archaeological history of Isaiah, the variations between extant scrolls or that chapters 40 - 66 seem to have been written about two centuries after Isaiah himself, but apparently they have so little regard for the knowledge of America's scholarship that they also don't expect us to remember that there are other and better translations than the King James version, some of which have incorporated what has been found at Qumran and most of all: that the original certainly isn't in English. President Obama was simply quoting the very popular New International Version. Some scandal.

One can hope that these fragments scraped from the bottom of the GOP slime barrel, indicate that the barrel is empty. Sad to say, it's very easy to make a fool of one's self in America, but it's still difficult to get Americans to notice it amidst the sound and fury.

Bringing out the Beast

There's nothing like God to bring our the animal in humans.

From my point of view, the people pretending there's a war on belief, a war on Christmas, a war on religion are using the traditional pose of being a victim to obscure and justify their eternal war on secularism, on Humanism and what they see not as its appeal to reason and compassion, but an attack on the ability to control people. The majority of our wars are sold as the need to assert the superiority of our God over that of another. So looking at today's newspaper, once again we have evidence of man's tribal nature and his ability to preserve his innate brutality and subdue his higher instincts and abilities in defense of something false.

As with the cartoon elephant recoiling at the cartoon mouse, in a nation of believers, one has to see such pettiness as a phobic insecurity and it's quite unavoidable to see the zero tolerance policy toward doubt for what it is: bigotry -- using God to justify arrogance.

There's an obvious terror behind the garbled, arrogant, condescending and strikingly hostile response to a Humanist statement in the local newspaper this morning. It seems that the idea that any kind of morality can be attributed to someone who does not believe in God is so abhorrent that the haste to denounce it requires truth to be left behind, along with reason, logical consistency and any sense of decency or honesty. There seems to be little requirement for the defenders of the Faith to take along any baggage such as history or theology unless it be false. So much easier to simply make up things on arriving at the burning grounds. Lie, slander and defame, God will know his own.

Typically, in such reactionary defenses, God is assumed to be the Christian God and yet no writer or reader of those hundred comments posted so far can be said to have the same God or the same concept of his will. So never mind the thousand years of bloodshed over what God wants or allows; will or won't or can or can't do; for the purposes of attack, there's only one God ( if sometimes three headed) with one, clearly defined will.

Typically, while such things as the Soviet penal system and Pol Pot's killing fields and the French reign of terror are blamed on the sin of daring to have values not dictated by clergy -- ecclesiastical support for slavery, persecution of Jews, Muslims, heretics, Humanists, agnostics, atheists and scientists seem hard to integrate with the pronouncements that obeying "God's laws" are always congruent with obeying "man's laws." That's so demonstrably nonsensical that it indeed does have to use a heavy anchor of belief to keep the slightest breeze of reason from blowing it away. The only laws that are in fact possible to disobey are written by man, else the universe would not be here and the only laws attributable to the divine are attributable whether the divine name is YHWH or Zeus; Newton or Nature.

"Our Founding fathers recognized that we're all sinners and so gave us checks and balances in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution,"

argues one local idiot, obviously ignorant of anything those men wrote in or outside of those documents. I guess the memory of opposition to a government appointed by and owing its authority to the Church of England's God has faded, not to speak of their militant humanism and vicious denunciations of what their fatuous heirs are now espousing. It would take one more determined and less weary than I to mention the fact that there is no punishment for "sin" in our Constitution, that being defined as something offensive to a God recognized by our government which by law recognizes no god in preference to another. Crimes are defined by the will of the people alone and change with that will. Hence we no longer burn witches and enslave millions.

I go go on for days, listing every false assumption and fallacious extrapolation. I could address the loudly shouted notion that if moral judgment stems only from God, one first has to determine which God we're talking about and then separate his or her or its inscrutable ways from all the various statements made on its behalf by prophetic ventriloquists. I could remind Genesis believers that mankind did, in that legend, acquire a moral conscience along with the baggage of having to accept responsibility, but I won't. I could explain without end or result how values of compassion and love, the values made such a mockery of by a religion claiming to be based on them can, are and always have been derived without need for Gods and their contradictory and confusing commands.

I'd be more likely to get results lecturing lemurs.

Fear and loathing in Oklahoma

The Muslims are coming! The Muslims are coming! Some day, anyway -- it could happen, and Oklahoma isn't OK with it. I mean, we really need to trash our secular constitution and make judicial decisions rely on a few selected Jewish commandments palatable to Christian godbothers, but we are simply not going to sleep at night unless we make it illegal for Judges to be swayed by other, illegal religions like Islam; not in Oklahoma.

No, Okies need to "Save our State" and have proposed an amendment to the State constitution making it illegal for judges to reference Sharia or any other international law and as 0.8% of Oklahomans are Muslim, we can't waste any more time in saving the state from the bearded menace. What is needed is a "pre-emptive strike" says State Representative Rex Duncan (Republican of course.) "Court decisions ought to be based on federal law, or state law" says he.

Of course I agree that they should. yet Federal law just might have a problem with the legislature interfering with judicial decisions and process. Beyond that, I think Federal and State laws should be free of any dependence on Christian doctrines as well, but we're talking about Oklahoma here and we're talking about Republicans everywhere and how can we expect even a modest amount of moral or logical consistency?

Dimwits, Denial and Dementia

Einstein's theory of General Relativity has undergone a hundred years of testing and once again its predictions of the way mass interacts everywhere in the Universe has won out over a competing hypothesis that attempted to dismiss the idea of Dark Matter and Dark energy that seems so contrived and ugly but steadfastly resists debunking. Science is about constant questioning and constant refinement of measurements, and so it will continue to be tested and mankind will continue to try to work out a unified theory of how the universe operates on the very large and very small scales -- perhaps forever.

Likewise, the Theory of Evolution has survived all challenges and has steadily explained more and more about how life changes over time through naturally occurring processes and algorithms. The gigantic amount of new geological data argues irrefutably for our planet being billions of years old. In fact, these sciences may be much better understood and documented than the physics we all tend to accept, yet one set of theories has been under attack by people who deny all the data and pretend that it's a hoax perpetrated by scientists for unknown reasons that probably have to do with invisible sentient entities in dubious battle.

Of course quantum mechanics and relativistic theories of space-time, matter, energy and gravity are much harder to comprehend and to demonstrate to the vast majority of people but you don't see anyone building museums and amusement parks or wasting their time lobbying school boards in favor of a Jerusalem centered universe or insisting on the presence of a "firmament" or an invisible kingdom full of invisible but powerful creatures so close to us that one could build a tower and like Jack with his beanstalk, walk right in. The Bible affirms this world view and certain desperate people insist that the Bible proves a 6000 year old universe even though Einstein and the geologists can prove otherwise beyond the shadow of a sane doubt. I imagine a fifth grader could explain to you how few stars would be in the sky in a 6000 year old universe or why a million years of ocean bed lies at the top of the Himalayas.

Confusing isn't it? But then you'd expect the actions of the confused to be that way and you'd expect the people whose lives are filled with the pain of confusion and the ignominy of stupidity to act with anger against a world view that defies their ability to understand. And so they do.

Any fool can think he's putting himself on a par with Ed Witten, not by disproving his math or offering better solutions that M theory, but simply by denying, by insisting without evidence that it's all a hoax. For the idiot, it's like being born again, only this time with a brain. I deny, therefore I'm smart.

Every year, students from Liberty University, a fake educational institution run by deranged liars for the Bible make a trip to Washington to look at a watered down for public consumption display of evidence for the origin of species - and scoff and snicker like George Bush at the Louvre. With wild and wanton ignorance of geology and all the accurate methods we have to date fossils, minerals and rock strata,

Lauren Dunn, 19, a second-year biology student at Ding-Dong Liberty University opined of an early mammilian fossil:

"210 million years, that's arbitrary. They put that time to make up for what they don't know."

She knows only what her mentors teach: irrefutable proof is nothing and if mathematics argues with legend, mathematics is a hoax.

Now here's the lesson in evolution: there is no known mechanism weeding out the genes for such defective brains in our species and in fact they tend to breed and to succeed better at reckless breeding than our Newtons and Einsteins and Feynmans and in ages past they would kill such people and still wish they could. My question is this, will it be our whole species that will look at the rubble of civilization while gnawing on bones and picking lice or will it only be Americans?

Dinosaurs don't pay taxes

In a way, we might look at the vast, seemingly endless and profoundly deep ignorance of Americans as a resource. Certainly many people make a good living from it. People who have less than an intelligent 4 year old's grasp of reality are willing to spend money to have their pathetic fantasies upheld in places like Dinosaur Adventure Land where you can view fake animals in a fake surroundings made to resemble fake history and pretend that the most certain things can be less certain than baseless conjecture.

Yes, I'm talking about Florida where for decades fake was like a second name for the state and sleazy roadside attractions and amusement parks made it a Mecca for kitsch enthusiasts and carloads full of rubes and hicks percolating down from Dixie. Much of it is still here, like the Weeki Wachee Mermaids and alligator wrestling and Lion Country Safari but as far as I know nobody is claiming that the mermaids are real or the lions were dropped off in Florida by Noah on his way to Turkey.

The fake history park in Florida flaunts things on their website like the idea that "the more is known about DNA the more difficult it is to escape the conclusion that all things have a personal creator." Of course there's no way around calling this a complete lie and if there is anything ineluctable about what's taught in Dinosaur Adventure Land is that nothing they say has any basis in fact whatever. Evolution as the origin of species and indeed as the origin of life from natural algorithms and natural law is not on its way out, isn't "just a theory" that Science is moving away from in the light of new data. Of course, the age of the Earth and of the universe is very accurately known and sorry, our planet is more than 4 billion years old and no man ever saw a trilobite or a Gorgonopsid or a Sauropod.

It's more than possible to escape the conclusion that existence of living organisms demands the existence of a deity and all their miracles and all the attempts to demonstrate otherwise have been shown to be fallacious and fraudulent. Yet, the Creationists persist in marketing their perverted epistemology demanding that unwillingness or inability to understand opens a window into understanding -- as though ignorance and stupidity were virtues. Wisdom through ignorance certainly winds through Christianity's bowels like a tapeworm but particularly through the kind of cartoonish fundamentalism sold like tawdry talismans at a flea market to tourists in T shirts.

It must be apparent that I view this kind of militant superstition as a cancer threatening any progress in learning and perhaps the safety of civilization itself and so you won't be surprised that I have to smile a bit to hear that an amusement park built on lies and the mockery of truth is in big trouble with the IRS for not paying employee withholding taxes and is due to be seized. Hardly surprising is it, that people who make a living telling lies and attacking the truth are dishonest?

Hardly surprising either that Kent Hovind, who founded the park and a ministry, Creation Science Evangelism, simply to profit by lying, would forget that Jesus told his followers to pay their taxes: “Ἀπόδοτε οὖν τὰ Καίσαρος Καίσαρι καὶ τὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ τῷ Θεῷ” or "Render unto Caesar. . ." Matthew 22:21

Hovind's position was that since he and his brothers in dishonesty worked for God, they didn't owe any taxes to the Government at all. I don't know what Jesus' position on obstruction of justice or last minute, back-dated, illegal transfers of property to avoid seizure was, but of course anything Jesus is supposed to have said is "just a theory" right? The argument was persuasive enough to get him 10 years in the slammer. For once Jesus and the Law -- and I -- seem to agree.

Hail Satan!

look, folks!
Right here in River City.
Trouble with a capital "T"
And that rhymes with "P" and that stands for pool!

Yes sir, Crooks and Liars has the story behind all our troubles. Barak Obama is the anti-Christ and "the Bible" proves it, at least it does if you're a demented, ignorant and dishonest idiot. Proof of course, to people who deny reason itself and prefer to believe what they're told by professional liars like World Net Daily, isn't what proof is to the fully rational -- but I digress.

What is or is not in the Bible of course has always been at issue, wars being fought and people being exterminated over such questions and for my part, although I know it's no more an accurate account of real history than the Gilgamesh Epic, I count the Gospel of Luke as a twisted derivative of some other book written by someone who was nowhere near Jesus of Nazareth in time or place or theology.

None the less, there are people who insist that God wrote it although which of the three it might be I don't know. Worse yet; there are people who insist that the book written long after Jesus' life on earth and in a foreign language in a foreign place and selected for the canon by a Roman high priest, predicts that US President, Barak H. Obama is in that nauseatingly idiotic Aristotelian tradition where things create their opposites: the Anti-Christ.

Of course if one doesn't believe there ever was a Christ, whether it be King David or Jesus H. it's a hard sell, but it's a hard pile to peddle if one simply knows a thing or two about certain languages and isn't situationally psychotic ( or a Fundamantalist if you prefer.) There is a word in Hebrew: (בָּרָק‎) usually transliterated as Barak and meaning Lightening. There is a word in Hebrew usually transliterated into English as Bimmah meaning amongst other things a platform from which scripture is read. It's sometimes translated as a High Place or ritual platform or altar.

Now comes the "proof" part. "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." (Luke 10:18) Put Barak and Bimmah together and you guessed it. QED. Our president is lightening from a high place ( if you leave out his middle name) and the antithesis of the man, whatever that means, who somehow, in some illogical way, was the heir to the throne of Judea.

Of course Luke isn't written in Hebrew or Aramaic but in Greek and the man who wrote Luke was a Greek ( the traditional names weren't assigned to these books until many years later) and so one has to wonder why he was speaking about our President and if somehow he was thinking in a language he didn't understand can we be sure he wasn't writing in code about the Commander of the prophetess Deborah's Biblical army, the late blues man Lightnin' Hopkins or a character from Amos and Andy? There is no way to get from the Greek Astrape to the Swahili/Arabic Barak or even a flash of light from the altar to the kind of Satan that crept into Christianity in the late first century. It's enough like logical progression for the legions of the unwashed however and a great reminder that half of Americans have double digit IQ's and little education.

Mr. Obama was, of course, named for his Kenyan father and in Swahili, a language filled with Arabic borrow words, the word means "blessed" as it indeed does in pure Arabic. Its cognate in Hebrew is Baruch, also a common name amongst the Jews. We see it in both languages used that way: baarak Allaah fiik or baruch ata hashem -- ( Borchu et Adonai in Aramaic as every Bar Mitzvah boy knows) God bless you or blessed is God, respectively.

There is no logical or honest progression through which we can pass Barak Hussein Obama,"blessed and beautiful Obama" as it means, and transform it into the metaphorical source of all evil with his origins in Babylonian and Persian mythology. Indeed one would have to pass it through that source of evil itself and that's just what has been done. What else in the phenomenal world can transform beautiful and blessed into ugliness and evil but the Republican hate machine?

There is no Devil but the devil in Man and no more devilish men than the men of the Republican Party, WorldNetDaily and the Religious right. Think about this when you listen to them crying about "Character assassination" of Sarah Palin. Look upon them and despair. If you're a Christian, think about the people that have made Jesus into a dirty joke and say something about it. If you don't think our government should be based on lies and the product of hate and stupidity wake up and never vote for a Republican again.

No presidents need apply

"It is clear that Notre Dame didn't understand what it means to be Catholic when they issued this invitation."

The invitation in question was From the University of Notre Dame to President Obama to give the commencement address tomorrow, May 17.

The opinion of Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, must be understood to be then, that it is not in the interest of maintaining orthodoxy to allow American Students to hear the thoughts of an American President who does not vow to follow the Roman Catholic Church's proclamations regarding abortion. More simply, the graduates are to be considered as Roman Catholic first, and Americans second -- at best. What it means to be Catholic is to obey, to surrender. What it means is not to listen to unapproved opinions or tolerate the holders thereof simply because they represent our country and our laws.

The Cardinal Newman Society has prepared a petition calling for Notre Dame president Father John Jenkins to tell the President of the United States he, as a non-catholic, tainted with the sin of heterodox and heretical ideas, is not welcome -- and Time.com tells us that the streets of South Bend Indiana have been invaded by wild-eyed crusaders like as Alan Keyes and Randall Terry carrying blood covered dolls while Cardinal James Francis Stafford, one of the highest-ranking Americans at the Vatican, asserts that the President of the United States should not soil the sacred ground because of

"an agenda and vision that are aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic."

There is no information about whether the aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic Stafford managed to say that with a straight face.

It's difficult to know just what the official "agenda" of the Vatican might be as concerns the Obama Administration as a whole or in relation to his relaxing of restrictions on stem cell research and his lack of requisite intransigence on the subject of abortion and Time spends more time speculating on it than I will, but is the day over when a candidate for high office in the United States can assure us (and be believed,) that he is an American first and a Catholic second? Indeed, can the University of Notre Dame assure us that it has any commitment to Democracy as opposed to religious authority?

Of course, as Abdon Pallasch at the Chicago Sun Times points out, such things are nearly standard procedure at the Catholic University. It's happened before; many times. Clearly, however, there is a persistent and durable movement of consequence amongst American Catholic leaders that seems to play well to those neo-Know-Nothings with anti-Catholic sentiments. This is a movement that reminds one far too much of the Church of earlier days and makes the ecumenical, tolerant sentiments of past Popes seem more like an interlude that's now over.

Of course it's not only the small mindedness or religion in general that divides America. Arizona State University, refused to confer the customary honorary degree on commencement speaker Obama on Wednesday, explaining that his "body of work" was insufficient even though foreign dignitaries whose BOW's were of lesser bulk had been. I suspect the Arizona libertarian/anarchist movement amongst the University administration here, but if The Daily Show's roast of U of A students was close to the mark, a good number of their students lack the brains to get a job sweeping Sesame Street and therefore don't think Obama has the right stuff; even for a fake Arizona Degree. Harvard will just have to do.

From all accounts however, the President was received well by the students and I have a feeling he will be at Notre Dame as well. The American People, particularly the younger ones, aren't the ones trying to tear the country apart for fun and profit, it's the same, cranky, closed minded and anti-democratic institutions and leaders who have been with us since the beginning. Soon may they disappear so that we can start to respect ourselves and our country once more.

Run Spot Run!

It's nice to know that in these days of turmoil and uncertainty about our future, Florida legislators are there to make things right -- and righteous. Never mind that you've lost your home, your job, your savings; your children are in foster care and the cardboard box you're sleeping in is starting to come apart in this morning's rain. Our crusaders in Tallahassee are about to give us what we needed all along and didn't have: a law forbidding obtaining "sexual gratification obtained from animals" or helping anyone else obtain it.

The Florida Senate has decided that exclusive of the requirements of animal husbandry, sex with animals should be a felony. Of course the meaning of animal husbandry had to be laboriously explained to one Miami Senator, Larcenia Bullard, who thought the proposal would allow bestiality if you married your animal. Yes, her name is Larcenia.

A House version of the bill was introduced by my own State Representative William Snyder. I'd like to make a cynical comment about his being, like that other crusader for chastity, Mark Foley, a Republican, but the Democrats are up to their knees in this barnyard too.

Every bit of legislation needs a scare story to justify it and this one demands our immediate attention because -- you guessed it -- someone says if you screw the pooch, you might become a pederast and sexual predator. Correlations are a dangerous thing, of course. Do remember that alcohol is correlated very heavily with most violent crimes and everyone who ever got drunk had milk as his "gateway" drink. Hitler was "very fond" of his dog too.

Of course this bill isn't meant to protect animals or children as much as it protects the righteous indignation of Bible addicts and do remember that Bible Belt fundamentalists have a much higher crime rate and that includes sexual crimes. Not that I'm suggesting anything.

“There’s a tremendous correlation between sexually deviant behavior and crimes against children and crimes against animals,” said Senator Nan Rich of Sunrise Florida. “This is long overdue. These are heinous crimes. And people belong in jail.”

Yes, Heinous indeed -- particularly the neighbor who thinks his crotch sniffing and leg humping dog is amusing. Now we can arrest him on felony gratification charges. Of course you'll have to be careful to shoo away the dog within the legally required number of seconds or you may be a felon yourself.

Of course the question of effectiveness hasn't been discussed -- remember this is a religious matter -- but without bugging the barns, interviewing the animals and the most intrusive and widespread surveillance ever instituted anywhere at any time, only an insignificant number of offenders will ever be caught. It doesn't matter however, this is about feeling moral and righteous. That animal most likely will be clubbed over the head, hung by its rear legs and have its throat slit so we can eat it and without making us flinch -- even if it had spent its short life nailed into a crate in a factory farm.

Perhaps the trigger for this crusade was a publicised case last year of a local man reported to have let his dog sodomize him. There was an outcry in the papers calling for him to be jailed and the animal euthanized without further ado. Truly we are a righteous people before the Lord.

So after all, there have been one or two cases of "animal abuse" in the last few years in this state of 11 million people and something needs to be done about this emergency right now. We've been wasting too much time on wars and economic debacles and it's time to make sure the stable boy isn't getting too hot and bothered watching the horses going at it. There are tremendous correlations, after all.

God kills

Evangelicals -- why do I have to call them that? It sounds too much as though I had some respect for their ideas or their actions when in fact those ideas differ from the ideas of the certifiably insane only by virtue of their numbers.

Witches, demons and evil spirits; a malicious bastard of a god who buries cute little children in mudslides, drowns them in floods and lets them rot with AIDS, starvation and malnutrition while performing "miracles" for those who cower, grovel and praise.

Of course it didn't take long for some jelly brained "evangelical" to declare the horrible holocaust in Australia the work of their God O' Love; his vengeance against the innocent for the collective and apparently hereditary guilt of not killing abortionists. I would hope he gets hit by lightening, but it would be more like justice to let him roast over the fire he justifies. I'm willing to bet his miserable god won't bother to do the Shadrach, Meschach and Abednigo trick on his behalf.

I'm not even comfortable with words like insane, since that would elicit feelings of sympathy such people do not deserve. I'm not of course calling opposition to abortion insane, but their justification seems to have little to do with anything more than keeping a fetus alive until it can be baptized. After that, their god or they themselves may just wish to kill it anyway for having some illegal opinion. God kills, says Pastor Nalliah of Catch the Fire Ministries. Particularly the innocent, it would seem.

Mary on my mind

I have to admit that it looks more like medieval images of Mary than most apparitions appearing in the news: burnt toast, rust stains, grilled cheese sandwiches. Usually any inverted U shape qualifies. This one however, appears in one "slice" of an MRI scan of a local woman's brain and the woman's sister, hoping to raise needed funds for medical care, intends to put it up on eBay.

I could ramble on about the sad story of someone growing up in a town polluted with dioxin and with a lifetime of health problems, including cancer, and who our "every man for himself" medical care system has left on the side of life's road, but instead I'll talk about my kitchen counter. It's a large grained slab of granite and there isn't a morning when I don't discover another hitherto unobserved face in it. It's not that I'm hung over or astigmatic or even mentally unbalanced. Our brains seem to be wired to seek out faces lurking in the weeds. It's probably a survival thing even if it's only Millard Filmore or Maynard G. Krebs staring at me, eating breakfast.

Of course nobody knows if there really ever was a Virgin Mary or whether she actually was Virgo Intacta until Yahweh shagged her -- much less what she looked like. I'm certain she wouldn't have worn medieval European clothing, but none the less, just like we know that Jesus had long, straight, lanky and light colored hair, with northern European features and was somewhat underweight, we know what she looks like. She looks like a structure in the brain of Pamela Latrimore, in blurry cross section.

Ms. Latrimore has no medical insurance and needs the money, so for once I'm hoping that the deranged and delusional will want some object to pray to (God screens his calls these days) and will bid it up. Unlike Burnt French Toast Jesi or tomato slice apostles it won't rot and unlike road stain apparitions of Jesus you can hang it on your wall. Maybe God made us prone to see faces just so that he could inspire people who pray to bird shit splatter on car hoods to actually do some good in the "love thy neighbor" department. Maybe not, but Pamela definitely needs the money.

Fight or flight?

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

This may be an existential moment for America; a "to be or not to be" dilemma. Still, not all of us are concerned with questions about whether to bail out the banks and brokers or to suffer the slings and arrows of market forces: some of us are more concerned about why God is allowing his chosen country to suffer.

The answer most satisfying to the Evangelistic ego of course is that, like most events tectonic and atmospheric, the credit crisis can be blamed on sex; gay sex.

Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies posted on the National Review's web site that he is sure that Washington Mutual's collapse is to be blamed on open minded hiring practices and not predatory lending and the risky loans it produced. Hiring Blacks, Gays and Hispanics with no regard to their dirty minority private lives or unacceptable ethnicity pisses God off.

No, this whole debacle is about sex and tolerance, not money, not debt. God likes money far more than tolerance after all, and as the late Jerry Falwell told us, you have to give money to God if you want to succeed. But you have to stop giving money to people who believe in abominations like birth control, says Christian leader Mike Heath. The credit crisis is about our "sinful sexual culture, and the acceptance of gay unions"

So perhaps if I were Hamlet and had to choose between opposing our troubles and ending them: or to die, to sleep no more, to end the heartache. If I had to choose between caring what happens to this country and walking away, taking leave of the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, I would simply sail away, another orphan.

The Alaskan Candidate

The Wasilla Assembly of God, the church in which Sarah Palin grew up and where she claims to have been "saved" and where she has given many a sermon herself, has taken down their web site that formerly carried video of her rather hair-raising speeches, but you can still still see video of her praying for dollars (30 billion of them actually) at the Huffington Post.

That church, very proud of their Stepford Governor and the intense programming that produced her is known for certain opinions and for portraying Jesus as being "in war mode" left us with a page admonishing us that God wants obedience to political leaders because God selected them all.

This afternoon, some talking head told me she represents America. I wonder if any statements ever made were more contradictory to the ideas behind our founding.

There's something quite chilling about listening to some perky little voice speaking utter madness as though she were discussing sports scores, but that's Sarah Palin. That's what she does and what she's about. It's what her church trained her to accept gleefully and without question or introspection or scruple.

If you want to see how well she fits with traditional American values, Simply compare Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, or any of those whose erudition and philosophy created this country through disobedience to authority and the creation of a state where authority comes from down here, not up there; compare it to what you'll read on the Wasilla Assembly of God site: As believers, we are reminded in 2 Peter 2.13 that we are to submit to those in authority.

We are here as Americans because we didn't, We created this country by denying precisely what these cheerful subversives advocate - the divine right of rulers. Sarah is so profoundly ignorant of American history that she thinks George Washington was responsible for the Pledge of Allegiance and she's so profoundly opposed to the ideas that created this country that as her pastor brags, she puts Jesus first: before America, before you and me and our families; before peace, prosperity, justice, compassion and stewardship of nature. She puts her twisted views of Jesus before her governorship and would certainly put it before her duties as the president of a free and secular republic.

John Kennedy pledged to put America before his beliefs. Palin will not. All presidents must pledge to uphold and protect the constitution, she belonged to a party that advocates "biblical law" instead.

What more do you need to hear? Want to talk about flag pins or singing the anthem and "terrorist fist bumps? Want to chant liberaliberaliberal with you hands over your ears untill it all goes away?

Ben Stein's brain

I used to watch the Comedy Central quiz show Win Ben Stein's Money; not because I liked the guy, but because I liked to be amazed at what he didn't know. Of course not knowing all kinds of political and historical trivia isn't an indication of being a dumb schmuck, but letting one's name be affiliated with a movie like Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is proof positive. It's slightly gratifying that the public largely has ignored Ben Stein's turd of a film although divine intervention in some really ghastly way would have been more gratifying.

The premise that "intelligent Design," the resurrected, quasi-Deist argument that life and perhaps the universe is too complex to have arisen through natural processes, has been so soundly, thoroughly and often humorously debunked over the last two centuries that it shouldn't be necessary to note that existence not only predates our inability to understand it but isn't subject to reducing its complexities to the level where a religious person can understand. Yes this is a religious argument and that's why it's only applied to Human evolution and not to the equally difficult aspects of quantum physics, general relativity and advanced mathematics. Imagine my saying that Tensor Calculus is flawed because it's beyond my ability!

Comprehensive denunciations of Intelligent Design have been around for centuries. It's a buried fallacy now exhumed like some hollow zombie only because our culture has lost touch with itself and the majority of us are as ignorant if not more so than we were 200 years ago. Percy Bysshe Shelley's refutation of Deism and his Necessity of Atheism not only makes Ben Stein's vaunted brain look dull and pedestrian, but illustrates the ironic appeal to victimhood that is this movie's argument. Shelly was thrown out of school for his brilliant efforts; thrown out by the same militantly dishonest dullards who claim to be unfairly treated by science.

The argument from Ignorance has it that biological structures like the eye cannot have originated without guidance from a supernatural intelligence because, say the the proponents of God, they don't understand the process. This proposition begins with the absurd and doesn't need to be reduced far for one to notice that according to such arguments, the greater the ignorance, the more true the propositions must be. To the ignorant, all things are equally possible.

Of course nature can be difficult to understand and even when understood, it can be counterintuitive. Humans took a long time to accept that up and down were relative directions and they roasted scientists alive for showing evidence that myths were incorrect. Battles were fought over such things as atomic theory and of course the heliocentric universe. Being less and less able to do so today, those who cling to and insist that others must cling to myth, have to create an additional saga of their own persecution: hence this movie.

If you buy into it of course, you cannot avoid admitting that you value comfort above honesty; that you see evidence as less valuable than comfort and that you want to punish anyone who disagrees. There is not only no evidence for order in the universe much less order than can only be a design, but the conjecture does not provide for the design of the designer. It's like the classic rebuff to the argument that there is no giant turtle upon whose back the Earth rests: it's turtles all the way down says the little old lady to Bertrand Russel. It's not an argument, it's a hysterical fugue. Imagine arguing for the existence of a "Firmament" or for a world that floats on water or a heaven one can walk into from a mud brick tower! Although ID may require only the Deus Absconditus of the Deists; a God who created things and moved on, there is no evidence, there is no science, nothing that can be demonstrated, nothing that can be inferred from demonstrable fact. ID is of the same ilk as magic, voodoo, deception, outright stupidity and pathological delusion.

The evidence for the origin of species through natural selection is sufficient that no alternative explanation can compete fairly, hence the unfairness, the dishonesty and the outright sleaziness of Steins movie. Do I need to repeat that there is no evidence whatever for the Divine hand other than the argument ad ignorentiam? If we must give equal opportunities for bogus theories and reject all standards for truth in education, we must abandon the notion of education altogether and return the universities to the Churches we took so long to dethrone. Ben Stein has bet his money that we will. I hope he loses every dime.

God, I hate ( your ) freedom!

That's exactly what Paul Broun is saying. You have religious freedom only as long as it's his God you and the government serve.

It makes one wonder whether the outcome of the Civil War was worth the price, that we have to listen to the crudely captious lies and confused rhetoric of Georgia Representative Broun preached on the House floor as though it were the dank cave of some hirsute and deranged religious extremist? Do I need to mention that he's a Republican?

We need, he says, to further illustrate the lack of separation between (his) God and the United States by removing a comma in the Pledge of Allegiance. There should be

"no separation or implied separation between nation and God."

said a spokesman, even though our founding documents forbid the establishment of State monotheism or indeed State recognition of any deity. Never mind that the Constitution forbids any religious test of any official - ever.

Last year this enemy of freedom supported legislation to honor a group trying to cram the Ten Commandments ( in their redacted Christian abridgements and without regard to the many sectarian variations ) up our collective colons in apparent obliviousness to their irrelevance in, and antithesis to Christian Theology.

"I commend the Ten Commandments Commission for their efforts to remind Americans that we are, in fact, 'one nation under God."

We are not, nor have we ever been, nor are we allowed by law to be and if we are to flagrantly ignore this guarantee of our rights, how many others must we ignore to please the haters of freedom?

If I were stupid, dishonest and deranged enough to be a Georgia congressman, I might introduce legislation stripping Broun of his office for his failure to preserve and protect the Constitution. As a private citizen who loves freedom I would like to see him stripped of his citizenship and deported.

War on Easter?

With Easter staring at us like the face of Mary from a used paper towel, I'm surprised at the dearth of miracles in the news. Of course there's still time. Then too, I'm more surprised that the nefarious Jews, Liberals and Secular Humanists haven't opened a second front with a War on Easter. Why, if they're hell bent on removing Jesus from the solstice wouldn't they be desperate to take him out of the Equinox? Is Mithras an ACLU contributer while Ishtar is not? It's hard to understand. Of course I never have seen as many department store rabbits as Santas but eggs still roll on the White House lawn even if the heads of the many transgressors haven't - as yet.

The papers haven't reported any rust stains that look like Jesus or potato chips or grease stained lunch bags with the face of his asexual mother lately; things that so often remind us that these figures are truly part of the fabric of the universe and not human fancy. Of course there's still time, and eBay regularly provides an income to those who find any U shaped marks on anything which can be interpreted as proof of their immanence. There's a steady market for such things and for those who don't want to pay miraculous event prices, there is a mold allowing you to produce toast with Jesus, his mother or other mythological figures for your breakfast enjoyment if not compliance with Biblical commandment. A little grape jelly and you get body and blood to go with your Easter egg.

Of course for those who love to see the sacred in the ridiculous - and who doesn't? - nature herself provides an endless supply; enough to feed fatuous faith in the followers of any nonsense one might construct. Behold the mighty duck who swims the endless lake so save us all from sin.

Lowering the bar

Now some of you may be thinking on this beautiful March afternoon; brilliant sun burning down through crystalline air; palm trees waving like tall women drying their long hair in the fresh sea breeze. Some of you may be asking yourselves on a day like this: just how stupid, vile and disgusting can a human being be? It's a hard question to answer in an election year and particularly this election year. That well is so dark and deep and foul smelling.

Iowa Representative Steve King, Republican of course, seems to have made an attempt to answer that question by declaring last Friday that

"The radical Islamists, the al-Qaida ... would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on Sept. 11 because they would declare victory in this war on terror,"

There's no point in asking how he defines victory, much less a "war on terror;" it wasn't meant to be a rational statement in the first place. He doesn't get any points for originality since we've been told that every Democratic candidate in my lifetime, at least, would have Stalin, Khrushchev, Ho Chi Min, inter Alia, screeching hallelujah like a Red State evangelist.

It's about his middle name, says King "because they read a meaning into that" and of course, if they didn't, King will be here to suggest that they do.

But no, King is just a snippy little mental midget. There are things more vile in the Republican depths than you might imagine. Take Ben Stein - please. Yes, the guy from the quiz show with Jimmy Kimmel; the guy with bit parts in the movies who wrote speeches for the slime-god Nixon. He's coming out with a movie next month called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Yes, it's about how science persecutes people who try to teach idiotic lies to your children because faith is more flavorful than honesty; less filling than facts.

Intelligent people of course think the jury is out on logic and mathematics, and most of all on the nearly inexhaustible proof that all life forms today evolved from ancient and simple life forms. That people like Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno and all those other heretics have been persecuting believers who only want the best for our children, is the kind of thing that comes from a deeper and darker and slimier part of the bottomless pit every stinking Republican parasite should be returned to as quickly as possible. I'm only saying that because I could get into trouble suggesting that they be smeared into paste by a red hot road roller.

Baptist Balls

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

-Bob Dylan-

Who says Florida is backward? Our State may rank near the bottom by many methods of academic assessment but at least now, at last, you can use the word "Evolution" in our schools - even if your kids still have to pledge that God is sovereign and not the people.

New academic standards that squeaked through by one vote Tuesday, now state that evolution is

"the fundamental concept underlying all of biology and is supported by multiple forms of scientific evidence."

No shit! So with one stroke and by one vote, Florida puts it's toe tentatively into the 19th century, trembling with fear and holy trepidation.

The executive director of the Florida Baptist Convention has objected to calling evolution the only fundamental concept underlying biology in an e-mail to the Florida Education Commissioner. John Sullivan the Baptist asserted that the Baptists firmly believe there's evidence of a "Creator-initiated origin of life." He didn't explain how he knew that Baptists believed this; whether they believed it because they were Baptists or Baptists because they believed it, nor did he tell us how many of these people doubted the evidence for gravity. The "evidence" for creationism consists entirely of the will to believe what someone once said in a book written before soap was invented and a carefully guarded ignorance of Geology, Genetics, Physics, Mathematics, Logic, Chemistry and Paleontology. Too bad I didn't have the Baptist Cojones as a student to try to dismiss the Calculus of multiple independent variables as a "mere theory" whose weaknesses were that Jesus didn't know how either and that I didn't do my homework.

"The weaknesses of science should be taught as well as its strengths"

says Sullivan and never mind the weaknesses of belief or of "God's Word" as concerns the Jerusalem centered, 6000 year old universe, a flat earth that floats on an endless sea and a fixed firmament studded with little lights that can be reached by building a mud brick tower above which a male God complete with navel and genitals, lives in endless and vindictive glory.

Right on the money

The coins of many countries have some sort of decoration or a motto around the rim. This descends from the days when coins had intrinsic worth and weren't mere tokens. The unscrupulous would shave the edges of gold and silver coins. When the latest series of "gold tone" Presidential Dollars was released however, the Religious Right, never known for superior cognitive function, raised holy hell and engorged their various web sites with rage and our in-boxes with viral e-mails excoriating the "liberals" for, as the ten Commandments command, taking God off the money or at least banishing him to the margins. Of course God isn't the name of God, but putting him on a dollar alongside a forbidden graven image is pretty close to taking his name (or names) in vain. Jesus made an issue of the inappropriateness of associating God with money and the money of his day had God written all over it.

Of course the motto wasn't taken off the money and it wasn't "hidden" as some of the more perspicacious idiots insisted, but these people are all about the cultivation and breeding of irrational anger and facts and reason are as carefully removed from their passionate fugues as weeds from a garden. What would irony aficionados like me do without that bottomless well of religious idiocy? I might have to stop writing and get a life.

God was on the money of England when we were a colony and on the Spanish Milled Dollar that was legal tender here at the time of the Revolution also asserted that the government and God were as one, or at least in cahoots. Our coins remained secular until the Civil War when it became politically advantageous to relate the Northern Cause to God's Cause even though God never said much about the evils of slavery. I will leave that to you to ponder over but isn't it ironic that it's mainly in the South where people want to continue that tradition while forgetting how it was used against them?

It's not that I give a damn about religious commandments. It doesn't bother me that so many hairy palmed and ignorant Fundies worship them like some mildewed stone idol and since I don't trust the government that issues the coins in the first place, I can just as easily mistrust the God of Coinage referred to on most, but not all, coins since 1864 and let them have their bone to gnaw.

So when Congress just had to take time off from our War to perpetuate all wars late last year; that war so dire that our birthright has to be sold in the name of security, to pass legislation making sure that God has to be there right next to the picture of the President on the coins we slip into the slots of Vegas or render unto those machines in the gas station mens room, I had to thank my god of irony for the gift.

Take that Jefferson! Take that Yahweh! Take that Jesus and all your Jewish, liberal, atheist, socialized medicine loving friends. You won't be turning over tables in our Republican temple.