Monday, April 03, 2017

in which the pond spends some quality Monday time with barking mad Oz fundamentalists organising a jihad to howl at the moon ...



It's a tough gig for the average secularist atheist these days, whenever some mug punter draws the short straw and heads off to read the reptiles of Oz ...

It's not that the average secularist atheist would want to scribble a passionate defence of Islamics, especially those of the fundamentalist kind ...

At the same time it's hard to recall a time when the reptiles of Oz raged with indignation about the assorted crusades which resulted in Islamics having the shit bombed out of them in Iraq, Afghanistan and sundry other places ... 

Why even in Vietnam it was the godless commies who were the baddies, while the profoundly corrupt Catholics got a free pass to heaven ...

That's why it's impossible to read any given Oreo rant on any given day and not reel back without some sign of startled bemusement ...



Well actually no, at least if you're an actual Christian, who has actually read Christ's teachings, it isn't morally reprehensible to allow all god's children to seek shelter ...

What's morally reprehensible is that your average secularist atheist seems to have a better grasp on the bible and Christ's teachings than the Oreo, but there you go ...

It's not as if the average secularist atheist is alone in this ... others get it, and show signs of having read the actual bible ...


Presumably there are some Islamics that return the favour ...

But somewhere along the line, the moderates and the peace lovers get drowned out by the shrieking, howling, wailing and bigotry of the fundamentalists of the Oreo reptile kind ...most interested in lathering up a clash of civilisations, rather than sitting down to a decent serve of tandoor halal chook ...

It doesn't leave much room for your average secularist atheist who happens to have a fair number of gay friends ...

You see, this day, the fundamentalist Xians were offered space in the reptile Oz to further their domestic form of prejudice, bigotry and homophobia ...



The pond has no idea how Tess manages to come out with a line about a "stern defence of basic human rights" unless it involved some form of projectile vomit ... and that was just the header ...


Now don't get the pond wrong. There are some actual Christians who don't seem to be obsessed with people who are in a loving relationship and understand the real meaning of hell ...


But you won't find any of that in the lizard Oz - instead, it's just a litany, a form of devotion routinely parroted over and over again, about the persecution of the Xians ... and the need for the empire to strike back ...

The pond is so tired reading this daily drip of venom and hate ... but there's much more to come ... cue the second gobbet of the Oreo ...


This sort of fundamentalist discrimination is what the average atheist secularist would consider extreme, obscene and offensive ... and profoundly against the stated approach of Christ to worldly as well as spiritual affairs ...

But in the Oreo world, the parable of the Samaritan and its talk of mercy to neighbours (no religious qualifications or exemptions mentioned) is just socialist Jesus being silly ...

There are any number of mentions of showing hospitality to strangers on the chance of entertaining angels - the UCC has organised a list here - but the pond most enjoyed this apocalyptic notion in relation to the Oreo ...


You can render "from his right" into a non-sexist "deprive the foreigners among you of justice" or similar, but the pond most likes the notion of judgment and smoting and smiting of the Oreo ...

What's always disturbing is the way the fundamentalist rhetoric of one religion is invariably matched by fundamentalists in another ...

Your average Xian gay basher really is just your average Islamic gay basher with a different text as an excuse ... yet somehow in Livingstone's peculiar world, the Xian fundamentalists end up as the underpinning of democracy ... as if secularism, the enlightenment and a dose of sensible atheism had nothing to do with the modern state or even the American constitution and bill of rights ...


Even worse, they have the fucking cheek and the arrogance to accuse the young of not knowing their history, when here the Xians are shamelessly filching what the Romans, the Greeks and their many splendidly pagan gods set in motion ...

But then that's how the Vatican got built, isn't it? They stole all the marble from the Colosseum and used it as the facade for St Peter's Basilica, and metaphorically, they've been doing the same ever since, as the stole the words and concepts of the classical writers and used them to feather their own nest ...

For any mug punter that made it this far - the pond feels your pain - here's a link to a piece by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker about the use of history by the courts, luckily outside the paywall for the moment...

It's only tangential to the discussion, but it's an interesting tangent ...

History, in one fashion or another, has a place in most constitutional arguments, as it does in most arguments of any kind, even those about whose turn it is to wash the dishes. Generally, appeals to tradition provide little relief for people who, historically, have been treated unfairly by the law. You can’t fight segregation, say, by an appeal to tradition; segregation was an entrenched American tradition. In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson, essentially reprising Dred, cited the “established usages, customs, and traditions of the people” in affirming the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws. In 1954, to challenge such laws, Brown v. Board of Education disavowed historical analysis and cited, instead, social science: empirical data...

History’s place in American jurisprudence took a turn in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, when the Court dusted off its incunabula and looked into what “history reveals about man’s attitudes toward the abortion procedure over the centuries,” as Justice Harry Blackmun explained. Abortion had not been a crime in Britain’s North American colonies, nor was it a crime in most parts of the United States until after the Civil War. “It perhaps is not generally appreciated that the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of States today are of relatively recent vintage,” Blackmun wrote. In turning back the hands of time, he didn’t stop there. “We are told that, at the time of the Persian Empire, abortifacients were known, and that criminal abortions were severely punished. We are also told, however, that abortion was practiced in Greek times as well as in the Roman Era, and that ‘it was resorted to without scruple.’ ” Roe overturned laws passed by state legislatures by appealing to ancient history. ..

 Lately, the field of argument, if not always of battle, in many fundamental-rights cases has moved from the parchment pages of the Constitution to the clay of Mesopotamia. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that overturned state bans on same-sex marriage, Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, reached back almost to the earliest written records of human societies. “From their beginning to their most recent page, the annals of human history reveal the transcendent importance of marriage,” he said. “Since the dawn of history, marriage has transformed strangers into relatives, binding families and societies together.” He cited Confucius. He quoted Cicero. The states that wanted to ban same-sex marriage described its practice as a betrayal of that history, but Kennedy saw it as a continuation, a testament to “the enduring importance of marriage.” Marriage is an institution with “ancient origins,” Kennedy said, but that doesn’t mean it’s changeless. Scalia, in a heated dissent, called Kennedy’s opinion “silly” and “pretentious.” As a matter of historical analysis, Scalia mostly confined himself to the past century and a half. “When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, every State limited marriage to one man and one woman, and no one doubted the constitutionality of doing so,” he said. “That resolves these cases.”

Liberal legal scholars disagree, and Stone’s “Sex and the Constitution” is an attempt to pull together all their evidence, for the sake of court battles to come. Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Jews believed that sex was natural and didn’t have a lot of rules about it, Stone argues. Early Christians, influenced by Augustine of Hippo, who in the fifth century decided that Adam and Eve had been thrown out of the Garden of Eden because of lust, decided that sex was a sin, and condemned all sorts of things, including masturbation. Stone speculates that the medieval church’s condemnation of same-sex sex, a concern that emerged in the eleventh century and that became pronounced in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, was a consequence of a new requirement: clerical celibacy. According to Stone, Aquinas argued that the sins of mutual masturbation, oral sex, and anal sex were worse if they involved two members of the same sex, a position that became church dogma in the sixteenth century.

The pond deeply apologises for introducing intelligence, insight and actual talk of actual history into the discussion. The pond acknowledges its brief is to reproduce the fuck-witted stupidities of the reptiles of Oz ...

If if intelligence and insight and the historical record must be ruled out, and misleading originalists just lie and lie, this creates something of a dilemma ...

What can your average secularist atheist do under this sustained assault of bigotry, homophobia, and shameless peddling of lies, distortions and misrepresentations ... remembering that Islamics are just as willing to play the game?

Well the pond recommends a hearty serve of Oreos, and the good news is that they've got rid of the nasty black bits, and now all that's left is a rich serve of creamy white goodness ...



Go on tuck in, think of them as racially approved wafers, blessed by god (the gluten intolerant can go to hell because the soul is embedded in the wheat) ... and don't you worry about Jesus. He was blonde and blue-eyed, and blessed by a decent amount of time in a tanning parlour  ...



11 comments:

  1. "At the same time it's hard to recall a time when the reptiles of Oz raged with indignation about the assorted crusades which resulted in Islamics having the shit bombed out of them in Iraq, Afghanistan and sundry other places ..."

    Er, yes it is hard. Because as sure as eggs is eggs, the reptiles have been applauding, encouraging and cheering each and every one of those bombings or dronings. The Oreo's wish for us all to focus inwardly on the Christian deaths in these blighted cicrumstances defies even the widest of logics. How many Muslims have been killed side by side the Xians? 50 times as many? 100 times as many? No, I'd say considerably more.

    But do go on Ms flaky wafer, do go on...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, but talking about "crusades" VC and taking our hint from DP's descent into "talk of actual history", we could recall the 4th Crusade, initiated by that egregiously name Pope, Innocent III that invaded and generally laid waste to "Christian" Constantinople - which of course demolished the Byzantine Empire and readied it for final demolition by the invading Ottomans.

      Quite apart from the destruction of Constanine's long standing bequest, it shows that Christians, especially of the RC kind, have never come to the defense of other Christians, and especially not those who are not of the RC kind.

      Delete
  2. The Oreo has really had a great time in this disquisition. Here's just a couple of things that amused me:

    1. Despite large church bureaucracies and well-resourced media departments in most dioceses, funded by those who pray and pay ...

    Of course, those who "pray and pay" can only achieve anything much because the rest of us let their "payings" go untaxed. Seems to be a permanent Christian conspiracy to ignore just how much we who don't pray pay for their pleasures.

    2. But the one that really tickled me was that later having lied through their teeth about how "...contemporary democracy ... had been influenced by the scriptures and Christian tradition - beliefs about the dignity of the human person, the rule of law, human rights, separation of church and state, respect for the individula and conscience, and government for the common good.", they went on to spout this: "since the Enlightenment, some have sought post-Christian foundations for democracy".

    They do want to completely validate Adolf Schicklgruber, don't they. What did he say ? Well, according to Wikipedia:
    A big lie is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

    Except for modern "Christians" of course - they have all the impudence needed and they're showing it daily.

    [Yair, I know: chink, chink, in go the coins.]

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Dorothy,

    Unfortunately i’ve never been "voted one of the top ten smartest people in Australian universities." and therefore can’t take a complex civil/religious/political war with multiple combatants whom have a multitude of motivations and then break it down to a simple MUSLIM BAD and CHRISTIAN GOOD argument.

    Due to my lack of being “acclaimed” as 1 of the top 9 “brightestpeople in higher ed” I therefore have to struggle with these useless facts.

    The Assad regime are Alawites a branch of Shia Islam and are viewed by the dominant Sunni’s as devil worshipers.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alawites

    They were oppressed under the Sunni Ottoman Empire but like a lot of their fellow Syrian Christian communities they were much more urban and wealthy than their predominately Sunni neighbours.

    They also shared a lot of similar cultural practises with their Christian neighbours;

    “The Christian elements in the Nusayri religion are unmistakable. They include the concept of trinity; the celebration of Christmas, the consecration of the Qurban, that is, the sacrament of the flesh and blood which Christ offered to his disciples, and, most important, the celebration of the Quddas (a lengthy prayer proclaiming the divine attributes of Ali and the personification of all the biblical patriarchs from Adam to Simon Peter, founder of the Church, who is seen, paradoxically, as the embodiment of true Islam).”

    After WWI the French took control of the Lebanon and Syria and after some initial resistance they found that they could deal better with the coastal/mountain Alawites and Christian communities than they could with the more hard line Sunni Muslims in the interior.

    When Syria became independent in 1946 it was the better placed Alawites who eventually dominated the Ba'ath Party and who would eventually take control of the country. For the various Christian denominations backing the Ba’ath and later Assad regimes was the safest and simplest path.

    For many Syrian Christians their fate is now fatally bound to the brutal Assad regime which is why geographically and politically so few have sought asylum.

    http://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/christian-refugees-unfairly-kept-out-of-u-s/

    Still it’s only facts and who cares about them anymore?

    DiddyWrote

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Dorothy,

      “Make them feel welcome this Easter”

      Lucky that their Easter and our Easter match up this year.

      https://www.factmonster.com/cool-stuff/holidays/easter-tale-two-easters

      DW

      Delete
  4. That plea for a "modern day Constantine" is very revealing - they don't want a fair go, they want a fucking state religion. Constantine didn't outlaw religious persecution, he just outlawed religious persecution against Christians, and only orthodox ones at that. Tough luck if you were pagan, or Jewish, or a heretic X'ian.

    He forbade the building of any pagan temples in Constantinople (preventing the resident pagans from communing with their gods). While the laws he passed officially tolerated paganism, his personal directives did the opposite, with pagan temples being pillaged or destroyed with his consent and later at his command (that had already been a thing for at least 30 years before he ordered it himself). He was quite happy to use his bully-pulpit to bad-mouth them regularly as well, condemning their "outmoded illusion", "madness of sacrifice" and their "temples of lies".

    As for the Jews, he outlawed some of their practices and reviving old laws restricting Jews ability to enter Jerusalem (allowing them to visit one day of the year on payment of a tax). So, "sure you can go on being Jewish, as long as you don't do anything that offends MY religious sensibilities". It took a secular pagan (Julian) to reverse Constantine's "tolerance".

    He also took it upon himself to pick sides it the pathetic little turf war that was the Arian controversy. "One substance" or "Like substance", there's a question for deep thinkers (once they've counted the number of angels on the head of that pin), but it still got people exiled because they would accept Constantine's religious dogma.

    The tensions he created spilled over into open conflict under his son Constantius II, with outright repression of paganism (eg - death penalty for performing animal sacrifices) and Judaism (leading to the umpteenth Jewish revolt in 351. He angered both sides of the Arian divide by trying to impose a compromise formula, but the X'ians should be more grateful, since he established many of the good things about the modern church, such as tax exemptions for the clergy, right to prosecution by church courts rather than civil, and (a personal favourite), the rule that Christian prostitutes can only be bought by Christian masters.

    In short, and as we all know, that "oooh, did you see 'im repressin' me?" schtick is just a plea to be back on top, where they think they belong. Transparent as it is pathetic.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oopsie - Para 4, line 3: read "would not accept"

      Delete
    2. Ah but, FD, to the likes of the Oreole - and the Anglican Archbishop too, apparently - declaring some version of "Christianity" as the new state religion was just an act of "outlawing religious intolerance".

      They've become extremely Orwellian of late - like "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Orwellian So we have patently false and absurd claims such as "Render unto Caesar" supposedly means that the Church initiated, and promoted and enshrined "the separation of Church and state" and that somehow the Church is the founder of modern democracy etc etc.

      And that the whole Enlightenment is just a feeble attempt to provide a secular version of all the "freedom" that the Church has delivered to mankind. The thing is, I can't work out whether this is all "Big Lie technique" or whether they are so willfully ignorant that they actually believe it. Or both, I guess.

      Delete
    3. Ah well since yesterday I have encountered this fabulous new postulate: "blue lies". Apparently we're all totally familiar with white lies (unselfish lies to make somebody feel better) and black lies (selfisho hurt others). But "blue lies" ? According to Scientific American, it goes like this:

      Blue lies are a different category altogether, simultaneously selfish and beneficial to others—but only to those who belong to your group. As University of Toronto psychologist Kang Lee explains, blue lies fall in between generous white lies and selfish “black” ones. “You can tell a blue lie against another group,” he says, which makes it simultaneously selfless and self-serving. “For example, you can lie about your team's cheating in a game, which is antisocial, but helps your team.”
      [ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/how-the-science-of-blue-lies-may-explain-trumps-support/ ]

      So now we can see that the Oreole is a dedicated black and blue liar. But then, can anybody think of a Murdochian reptile who isn't ?

      Delete
  5. Regarding Oreo's use of the controversy surrounding Jakarta's Governor Ahok, as an Aussie Muslim bilingual in Indonesian I've been following that story with interest and concern. Ahok is an honest, capable administrator and is respected for that. Unfortunately he is also a blunt speaker who doesn't suffer fools gladly and he decides who he regards as the fool. I've seen him interviewed and I think he's a better administrator than a politician. That has caught up with him now. He spoke bluntly - and not wisely - about a religious matter he didn't know much about. A wiser politician would have consulted a friendly imam - he knows many - and given an uncontroversial answer. Despite that, millions of Jakartans support his election and most of those are Muslims. He won the first round and a poll in March showed him on nearly 66% for the second round. I don't think this is an example of persecution of Christians despite the current court case against him.

    ReplyDelete

Comments older than two days are moderated and there will be a delay in publishing them.