…and burns to the ground.

It sounds to me like God was trying to tell someone something, if you’re the kind of person that believes that the hand of God is actively guiding and causing everything that happens.

I really don’t understand the attitude that says that god deliberately created everything the way it is, then turns around and gives god credit for the good stuff, while blaming Satan for the bad stuff. And then they want to punish people for not being lousy human beings greedy, vengeful, and small-minded, for wanting “social justice”.

Yeah, if you want to do that you might have to rewrite the Bible to get rid of the liberal parts. Which they’re doing. Yeah, they’re doing that. They’re just going through with a marker and getting rid of all the inconvenient stuff that goes against the modern wingnut creed of greed, racism, and classism. They’ve decided that shouldn’t be there, is only there because of a mistranslation, the same mistranslation that forgot to tell us that Jesus rode on dinosaurs, and loved baby dinosaurs too, no doubt.

Do you suppose they’re going to write that in? In fact, the more that I think about it, the more I am convinced that God did it to show them how pissed he was about the biblical revisionism project.

Either that or it was natural for lightning to strike the highest object around.

So we all think it ought to be okay for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan to be a lesbian, although there seems to be a consensus among her long-term friends that she’s straight, and has just committed herself to her career.

But what about Scalia? Now there’s a person with abnormal atypical sexual proclivity if I ever heard of one, far more unusual than teh gay. Why, he’s got 9 kids! How can he possibly identify with the lives of normal people?

Inquiring minds may or may not want to know (I know I didn’t want to think about his sex life). I just assumed that he’s one of those ultrafundamentalists who believes that it is murder not to conceive as many babies as humanly possible. Yeah, we really need people like that on the Supreme Court.

Link

Now personally I don’t think she is especially well-qualified for the job. Although she has education and employment background, she has no track record as far as most issues are concerned.

I would like to see someone like a defense attorney for a change or a consumerist like Elizabeth Warren.

But Constitutionally speaking, the bar is pretty low. There isn’t even a requirement that the person be a lawyer.

The right wing can’t get their heads around any of the real issues, so they talk about her sex life, gender orientation (she’s not as cute as Sarahpalin, so she must be a dyke!), her softball skills…

And the fact that she is Jewish.

First Pat Buchanan:

Indeed, of the last seven justices nominated by Democrats JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one was black, Marshall; one was Puerto Rican, Sonia Sotomayor. The other five were Jews: Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.

Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?

But while leaders in the black community may be upset, the folks who look more like the real targets of liberal bias are white Protestants and Catholics, who still constitute well over half of the U.S. population.

What a shame we’ve used up our quota of Jewish nominees.

And Pat, I thought you were opposed to immigrants like Hispanics. Catholicism, your religion, is a small minority that is way overrepresented on the court, even when you take into account Hispanics, which I don’t think you intended to do, since you never have given them any consideration before.

And now conservative judicial activist Manuel Miranda

MIRANDA: I think the real concern is, the question has to be, is Elena Kagan still a socialist? And the reason I say that is because in her early writings, in her early life, in the formation of her political sense, it is pretty clear that she is an American socialist. She comes from that background. I grew up in New York, she grew up in New York. I’m very familiar with the sort of Jewish socialist culture in New York, which has an enormous pedigree, has done wonderful things in promoting a way of life and developing American society, but at the end of the day is still socialist.

Seriously. We know all Jews are socialists, don’t we? And socialism has done great things for American society, except for the fact that it is totally evil and needs to be eradicated.

On the Daily Show Lewis Black tells it like nobody else can. But somebody’s got to say it to that moron Beck.

No, being a rich banker in the US is nothing at all like being a Jew in Nazi Germany about to be hauled off to a concentration camp. Cut that shit out.

Glenn, save yourself, before it’s too late!

The Maine GOP just came up with a brand new Tea Party oriented platform. It says a little bit about a lot of things, mostly wingnut talking points. There is no sign that anybody was thinking too hard when they put it together. My impression of the Maine Republican party is that it is so small that it would be easy to overrun with not very many warm bodies, which is why I suggested partly in jest last year that us progressives could swoop in there and take it over. We could use a party of our own. But who listens to me?

Although the document is chock full of wingnutty teabaggy whackiness, there’s one part I’d like to discuss.

II. To Establish Justice:
…
b. Reassert the principle that “Freedom of Religion” does not mean “freedom from religion”.

Wait, what? If they are saying that individuals do not have the right not to be religious, how will that be codified into law? What are they planning to force us to do? Who will they have enforce it?

How will they determine who does not believe, by home invasions by religious police belonging to a certain state-approved sect? Interrogations with torture?

When was this previously asserted, during the Dark Ages?

How will they force us to believe, on penalty of death by fire?

Of course their hope is to institute wingnut extremist religious education in our schools that all children would be forced to take, whether they belong to a sect that believes and practices that at all. Because, yanno, they’re right and everybody else is wrong.

People who don’t belong to their church would no longer have the right to raise their own children to believe as they believe. They hope to take over the curriculum and replace science with Bible worship.

God also told their leaders to tell them to hand over all their money so they could hire gay prostitutes over the internet build a powerful religious empire that will inspire non-members to accept that they are wretches who don’t deserve life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or the money they earned.

If God had intended any of them to be wealthy, he’d have made them wealthy.

God is responsible for everything. If you don’t have health insurance, it’s because he didn’t want you to. If you have Medicare and someone else is poor, it means you deserve it and they don’t.

Maybe what they have in mind is what I call “competing religious rights”, specifically where one person’s religion tells them to harass people until they convert them spread the joy of Jesus, while the presumed potential convert simply wants the right to be left alone. How about starting religious wars? Should the person who has heard a message from God telling them to kill those who worship what they consider to be false gods, as often happened in the Old Testament, have the right to do so?

Are those who appear to be worshiping money worshipping false gods?

Not permitting self-proclaimed “Christians” to indoctrinate our children with their wrong-headed beliefs is considered “persecution”. For atheists to speak up about their opinions is “persecution”. The fact that others are even permitted to exist is “persecution”.

I’m starting to think religion is insanity.

This woman has decided to define it for all of those of us who are unclear on the concept.

My email is still being bombarded by thoughtful posts on John Shore’s blog. A couple of thoughts:

Although many if not most of those who primarily identify themselves as “Christians” like to think that anyone who does not belong to their narrow sect is not also a “Christian”, in fact anyone who believes in Jesus as divine is by definition a Christian. I was raised a Lutheran, and we did not go out and try to convert anyone (though I can’t speak for other Lutheran sects or those in other parts of the country where attempts at religious hegemony are the rule, rather than the exception). The majority of Christians I know do not proselytize. To what extent is it a mandate to evangelize? Only within certain sects? Or is the proselytizing mandate something that is fulfilled by having some other sort of outreach that can be fulfilled by the minister or outsourced to missionaries?

I see true “witnessing” not as trying to preach to others but as setting an example in the way you live your life. If you can’t live your life according to what you preach, we don’t see you as a sinner who is “still working on it”, we see you as a hypocrite. We see “Jesus forgave me” morphed into “Jesus will forgive me no matter what I do, so I’m going to go ahead and do it” all the time. Otherwise your leaders would lead holy lives, or at least attempt to, rather than hiring gay prostitutes while working against gay rights and claiming to be straight.

The idea that we haven’t heard The Word is so laughable it is stupid. Seriously stupid, use your brains, please. After you walk away offended because we won’t listen, consider how many millions of other believers out there are waiting in line to harass each and every one of us who told them to go away. You’ve chosen to single out people who have no interest in what you are saying. In the very least you need to learn to live with rejection.

You’re out there trying to convince people that they lead wretched, impotent lives. Once in a while you find somebody who already feels this way. But aside from that, you are just trying to spread misery and apathy in the world by trying to make people who are doing just fine feel miserable.

The “good” you are trying to do is to convince people to be satisfied with their miserable lives and not take action against those who are responsible for their misery – rich politicians, usurious mortgage and credit card companies, larcenous banks, and churches who take their money and spend it on expensive buildings and lavish lifestyles. Your leaders are rewriting the Bible to edit out much of what “God’s Word” used to be, because it conflicts with their worship of money. If you are politically active at all, you are trying to make more people miserable by preventing them from getting the same government benefits you love to draw.

Go away. Your words are hollow, like the wind.

with the Christianists and the rest.

John Shore wrote a blog post on Huffington Post about 10 Ways Christians Tend to Fail at Being Christian. It’s not the kind of thing I would normally read, but it was really interesting. Each of his premises linked back to his blog, which has gotten a ton of traffic and posts. The only comment thread I actually subscribed to was the one for What Non-Christians want Christians to hear. That’s a good thing. I’ve gotten bazillions of notifications in my email on that one, and despite the fact that I enjoyed reading them, I would have been overwhelmed by more.

The post is 3 years old, but it has caught on fire. Believers try to figure out what they need to do to convert more of us without actually having to look at our comments and consider our beefs.

Whatever. I recall once being trapped at an airplane bathroom by a Native American woman in some kind of costume and really bad breath. I said nothing, hoping that whoever was in that toilet would come out so the line would move, and she just kept hammering me on her faith, trying to convert me. Oh, and she had really, really bad breath.

I don’t think you’re a “good Christian”, John. You are way too open-minded, thoughtful, and tolerant.

The real reason why religion doesn’t belong in schools.

And another of theirs on creationism:

Remember when Pat Robertson declared that Hurricane Katrina was God punishing New Orleans for being sinful? Remember when he said that the great tsunami was God punishing Thailand, Indonesia, etc, killing millions of people because they weren’t born Christian? Remember after the Haiti earthquake he announced on television that God was punishing Haitians for their ancestors having made a “pact with the devil” to free them from slavery, a combination of good old right wing historical revisionism, racism, and Christianizing?

Well, it’s clear to me. The winter storm of the century has hit Washington DC, and God is punishing Congress for listening to lobbyists and the assholes on C Street and failing to pass meaningful health care and economic reform.

So there. Somebody had to say it.