Restoring America?  Seriously, First Redeemer?

Sign reads: Restoring America Conference, October 10-12, Ann Coulter, Herman Cain, Fred Barnes, Walid Shoebat, Free Admission

We are so screwed. Where is the great middle?? Left/right extremists are ruining this country.

The U.S. Constitution is at the heart of what the Campaign for Liberty stands for, since the very least we can demand of our government is fidelity to its own governing document.  Claims that our Constitution was meant to be a “living document” that judges may interpret as they please are fraudulent, incompatible with republican government, and without foundation in the constitutional text or the thinking of the Framers.  Thomas Jefferson spoke of binding our rulers down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution, and we are proud to follow in his distinguished lineage.

With our Founding Fathers, we also believe in a noninterventionist foreign policy.  Inspired by the old Robert Taft wing of the Republican Party, we are convinced that the American people cannot remain free and prosperous with 700 military bases around the world, troops in 130 countries, and a steady diet of war propaganda.  Our military overstretch is undermining our national defense and bankrupting our country.

We believe that the free market, reviled by people who do not understand it, is the most just and humane economic system and the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known.

I’m not thrilled with what appears to be alignment and re-definition around the Republican Party, but the Republicans can only benefit from the attempt.

Also worth checking out:
The Evangelical Atheist: Why Theism Matters by Walter Scott Hudson

Also, it had been a month since my last post.  I need to do better.

The dumb get confident, while the intelligent get doubtful. That’s the conclusion that David Dunning and Justin Kruger came to when studying people’s perceptions of their own talents. What has now become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect…

Full discussion on The Science Show.  Abbreviated version posted by Boing Boing.

Incidentally, this was observed centuries before the release of the research paper:

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.
– Confucius

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
– Charles Darwin

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the
intelligent are full of doubt.
– Bertrand Russell

Related argument by Brian Dunning on Skeptoid (no relation to David Dunning) saying that people are not dumb or “stupid”, just misinformed:

The same goes for Sarah Palin, Ben Stein, Ken Ham, Bill Maher, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, and Prince Charles, all people who actively promote bad science or misinformation, and who believe they’re doing the right thing.

I like his list of misinformed personalities.  Check out the full piece on Skeptoid.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/entertainment-industrys-dystopia-future

This is the real undoctored web site

Deals to Good to Be True!  But, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch…

Millions in prizes at Corpus Christi church this Easter, but at a price.

“The Ultimate Giveaway” sounds like a promotion at a car dealership or a department store, not a contemporary, non-denominational church, but that is (in fact) the name of the Easter service series at Corpus Christi’s Bay Area Fellowship, where they’ll award $2 million to $3 million in prizes this weekend. It’s meant to sound worldly and materialistic so that they can draw in local unchurched populations, Cornelius insists. The church says it has only heard complaints over the campaign from fellow Christians. Well, you can officially register my complaint. Organized religion is already distasteful enough.  If the promise of everlasting life doesn’t do it, just give away cars!

The “twist” is that the real Ultimate Giveaway was John 3:16:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.
– John 3:16 (New American Bible)

Ugh…  please.  This mythology is so old and tired.  The story is fraught with so many issues, and using Easter as a marketing opportunity is giving plenty of people heartburn.  The price of course is the cheapening of everything.  Being a good Christian is now something people need to be tricked into… wait a second.  I guess things really haven’t changed, they are just more up front about it now.

Stop the madness… and don’t even get me started on the mess the Catholics have gotten themselves into.

“The problem is not in Muslims,” he continues. “The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to.”

These are all dangerous words. Of the threats issued to his life by Islamists, he says, “That’s not the worst thing that can happen to you. I’m OK with it, I’m not afraid. . . . Palestinians have reason to kill me. Some Israelis may want to kill me. My goal is not to defeat my enemy. It is to win over my enemy.”

from the Wall Street Journal

The Week – Talking Points
Friday, January 22, 2010

As news broke of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, Pat Robertson said on his TV show that Haitians themselves were to blame because of a pact Haiti’s founders made with the devil.

“It’s no secret that the Rev. Pat Robertson is a yammering fool,” said Carl Hiaasen in The Miami Herald, “but last week he hit a new low.” As news broke of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, Robertson explained to the million-strong audience of his syndicated TV show, The 700 Club, that Haitians themselves were to blame. In the late 18th century, he said, Haiti’s founders “swore a pact to the devil” in return for being freed from their French colonial masters. Robertson’s remark was not only heartless, said Peter Wehner in National Review Online. It failed to “correspond with any serious understanding of Christianity.” The Christian faith, at its heart, is about mercy in this world and redemption in the next. Only in Robertson’s distorted imagination would an angry Christian God dish out misery to an island full of innocents, to punish them for the supposed heresy of their great-great-great-grandfathers.

Or, maybe, religion is the imagined myths of our ancestors and is just as absurd as the voodoo believed by the Haitians.  Wouldn’t this all be so much simpler without weird superstitions polluting the issue?

Robertson’s interpretation of events was admittedly “obnoxious,” said Elizabeth McAlister in Forbes.com, but interpreting the unfathomable is a preacher’s job. The purpose of religion is “to make sense out of chaos,” to discern and reveal “the unseen forces that cause things to be the way they are.”

What a shame. Science, not religion, has been explaining the majority of the “unseen forces” that were formerly the purview of religion exclusively… say about 400 years ago.  Science and reason have been steadily capturing ground ever since.  It goes even farther back if we consider some of the great thinkers of Greece, Rome, China, India, Iran, etc.

The great irony here is that while Robertson’s remarks have outraged people here in the States, many Haitians have long suspected that there are supernatural underpinnings to the island’s horrible run of bad luck. And according to mainstream Haitian lore, said Eric Metaxas in FoxNews.com, the country’s founders really did hold a voodoo ceremony at which they slaughtered a pig and “made a pact with the devil.” No one knows whether or not the myth is true, of course, but is it so outrageous of Pat Robertson to suggest that “starting a nation this way might not be the best approach?”

No one knows if the myth about the voodoo myth is true???  And then a jackass preacher comes along with his own Christian myths to explain why the earthquake happened in the first place??  Really???  Is this how collectively enlightened we are in 2010?  Holy fuck.

That we are even “having this conversation is ridiculous,” said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. We long ago learned that earthquakes are caused not by vengeful deities but by the shifting of Earth’s tectonic plates, and they bear no “malice toward any particular man, woman, or child.”

Thank you, Kathleen!

Don’t tell that to Robertson, who said 9/11 was God’s punishment of a sinful America, said Michael Rowe in HuffingtonPost.com. Through such bile, Robertson solicits millions in donations from his spellbound flock, and shelters those ill-gotten gains behind his religious tax exemption. Who is it really, Rev. Robertson, “who’s made a pact with the devil”?

And thank you, The Week, for telling it like it is.

Friend to the Poor?

It’s so interesting how two groups can see an issue in two radically different ways.

I think it’s sad that with all the suffering, disease, and famine that Mother Teresa saw, that she thought abortion was the issue.

Catholics are all up in arms about the atheist viewpoint on this too:

Atheist group urges boycott of Mother Teresa stamp

I swear…

Mother Teresa: The Greatest Destroyer of Peace is Abortion

For the other perspective, check here:

Sam Harris on Mother Teresa

Idiot.

Atheist gives invocation at Cobb meeting

By MARCUS K. GARNER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

9:11 a.m. Thursday, July 30, 2009

No need to bow your heads, folks.

That’s what Smyrna atheist Edward Buckner told people before leading the invocation Tuesday night at the Cobb County Board of Commissioners meeting.

“It’s actually a protest against invocations,” the president of American Atheists said Wednesday night. “My goal is to get them to stop doing invocations.”

County board of commissioners chairman Sam Olens, reached by phone Wednesday night, said he was offended by Buckner’s actions.

“Did I find his comments repugnant and insulting? Yes,” Olens said. “He abused the process by giving an opinion … rather than providing inspiration.”

What Buckner did was thumb his nose at what he believed was an unconstitutional cross-section of religion and government, he admitted in his words Tuesday night.

Rather than any form of deity, he invoked “the 700,000 people who live in this county — especially the majority (yes, over half) of those 700,000 who are not members of any church, mosque, temple, or other religious organization,” he said.

“I speak as well for those political leaders who despair that success in politics cannot be achieved without hypocritical piety from politicians and who would prefer to run for office and to govern based on competence and political philosophy rather than on beliefs, real or pretended, in any supernatural beings.”

Olens, a candidate for state Attorney General, said he was surprised by Buckner’s tirade.

“I expected that it would be in the context of inspiration,” Olens said.

Buckner said he was disappointed that Olens made a “disclaimer” before he spoke, saying that federal law requires the county to let anyone who signs up make an invocation.

“This county is pro-religion and they act like anybody who isn’t is a second class citizen,” Buckner said.

Buckner is no stranger to protesting religion in government.

In 2005, he was one of seven Cobb residents who with the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit to halt the practice of invocations before board of commissioners’ and planning commission’s meetings.

But last year, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed in a 2-1 ruling with a lawsuit’s contention that the Constitution permits only nonsectarian prayers.

And earlier this month, Buckner spoke out during public comment against the commissioners’ approval of a plan by the county’s development authority to issue up to $14 million in bonds to lend to North Cobb Christian School for renovations.

Olens said the county received an E-mail from Buckner requesting to do an invocation, and allowed it because of First Amendment laws.

“Had I stopped him before he started, he then would’ve had a federal action against the county,” Olens said. “That’s the price you pay for being American.”

Buckner had this to say for those he may have offended.

“Join me in asking Cobb County to stop having invocations,” he said.

Full video of the event here with a backup link here. Thank you to the Cobb County Commission for being respectful and polite during the proceedings. It’s just too bad that Olens is so chagrined by his fellow citizens exercising their rights that he had to go on record after the fact as being offended.  The price you pay…?  What an asshole…

Loved the smattering of applause at the end.  I only wish I knew what Ed said in place of “under God” during the pledge…  it obviously was not “under God”.  Cheers, Ed.