Let’s all argue about who’s not a Christian

It is so common, so predictable that whenever the silliness or insanity of one pastor or another is discovered (surprise!), some defender-of-the-Faith will declare that this person and his followers are not really Christians. I’ve heard fervent Muslims and Jews say the same thing about their co-religionists and the claim in Islam is frequently used as an excuse for murder.

 

It strikes me that one cannot say that Parsely and Haggee are not Christians. Not any more than one can say that Clinton or Bush or Obama are not Americans just because we don’t agree with them.

 

Christians would LIKE to believe that following Christ is a cure for stupidity, venality, lust, greed and bad hair. Since following Jesus makes you a good person, if you’re an obvious tool, then you can’t be a Christian. They cannot concede that some Christians are simply stupid, evil, barbaric assholes because that would mean the magic doesn’t work. That would mean that you can’t buy personal transformation. Jenny Craig won’t make us thin, Yale won’t make us smart, Chanel won’t make us pretty, an SUV won’t give us a big dick and Jesus doesn’t make us better: We’ve still got to do the work ourselves. 

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Shameless, or Clueless?

Ben Stein has now invoked the Holocaust, saying that it was science and scientists that dragged millions of jews into Nazi extermination camps in WW2.

“When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. [PZ] Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed.… Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.”

 

“God is With Us” was the slogan emblazoned above the swastikas on the belt buckles of the Nazis that led Ben Stein’s relatives to their deaths. It was pseudo-science they used to cloak centuries of institutionalized religious hatred and their ideology of racial superiority beneath a veneer of card-board legitimacy. In opposition to reason, decency and science, the Nazi’s employed quackery, intolerance, defamation and religious fanaticism. These very tools are being used enthusiastically by Ben Stein and the Creationist movement and have produced a similar result: Dogma slathered with fable. 

We’ve been pummeled by images of 9/11 for the past seven years, by the very people who’s dereliction made the attack possible in the first place, and the tactic has worked very well. In a contemptible homage Stein is now exploiting the holocaust and violating the memory of it’s victims. 

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Current Nightmares: An Alternative Future History of the United States

In the final days of the last Republican Administration the President of the United States resigned from office. Those who’d been crying out for impeachment, who’d felt betrayed when Democrats in congress took that option off of the table prior to the 2006 elections actually began to cheer. Those liberals and moderates, there were not that many, who’d been playing the game a few steps ahead all along, realized that the board had been overturned and the pieces scattered.

President Dick Cheney’s first act was to issue the longest list of pardons in the history of the office. On that list appeared the names of the CEOs of every company that had received no-bid contracts to do work in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On that list appeared the names of every CEO of every oil and energy producing company doing business in the United States. But most people never read that far down because at the top of the list was the name of the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush.

Most of the people on the list had not been charged with any crimes and neither had the former President. The pardons were blanket absolution of any and all offenses and were specifically worded to cover any acts committed in the previous eight years. Dick Cheney’s name was not on this list. A President may not pardon himself. He’d received his amnesty from the hand of the previous President before moving into the Oval himself.

Not that it mattered. Three hours before his successor took the oath of office in Washington D.C., Dick Cheney, 44th President of the United States for only two days, stepped off of Air Force One in Dubai. His company, Haliburton, had moved its headquarters there three years before because of the city’s proximity to their Persian Gulf clients, it’s reverence for corporate culture and the absence of any extradition treaty between the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America.

I Give Up

Someone gave Ben Stein money to make a movie supporting creationism. Ben Stein thinks the theory of evolution is a foundational principle of nazism. 

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/video-ben-stein.html

Ben Stein is an educated man and a jew and so one assumes he has been exposed to a bit of history:

The catalog of anti-semitism, the centuries of pogroms, ethnic cleansing and religious murder that have been universal features of european social and political activity until modern times cannot be lost upon him.

The fact that the mindless brutality which fascism forged into a political and social crusade was a part of Catholic and Protestant education for centuries before Darwin cannot be news to him. 

That those churches which most violently opposed the theory of evolution, as well as the germ theory of disease and observations of a helio-centric solar system, were also the greatest boosters of jewish slaughter.

It cannot be lost on Ben Stein as he conjures the most transparent slanders that in doing so he makes common-cause with the kind of bigotry, ignorance and fear-mongering which provided the foundation and nourishment for fascism and for centuries of its previous incarnations. 

Ben Stein is not a stupid man. He’s not an ignorant man. So how does one explain his arrival at such stupid, ignorant conclusions and with such mindless and transparently dishonest argument?

 

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