<body><script type="text/javascript"> function setAttributeOnload(object, attribute, val) { if(window.addEventListener) { window.addEventListener('load', function(){ object[attribute] = val; }, false); } else { window.attachEvent('onload', function(){ object[attribute] = val; }); } } </script> <div id="navbar-iframe-container"></div> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/platform.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> gapi.load("gapi.iframes:gapi.iframes.style.bubble", function() { if (gapi.iframes && gapi.iframes.getContext) { gapi.iframes.getContext().openChild({ url: 'https://www.blogger.com/navbar/12988030?origin\x3dhttp://donttrustsnakes.blogspot.com', where: document.getElementById("navbar-iframe-container"), id: "navbar-iframe" }); } }); </script>


DON’T

TRUST

SNAKES

“I know where I'm headed.”
ROGER THORNHILL


Tuesday, May 06, 2008

This is supposed to attract me?

Labels:


posted at 8:59 PM

Friday, January 18, 2008

"I am a bit troubled. I believe my son has a girlfriend, because she left a dirty magazine with men in it under his bed."

There are some real gems here.

The merest sampling:
"In my opinion, if an animal in the wild like a swan is caught being gay it should be shot on sight, disinfected, and used to feed the poor."
"I propose that sports greatly hinders the development of godly, Biblical, feminine character. Parents today expend extraordinary amounts of time and energy taking their daughters from one sports event to another, week after week, even to the point where it exhausts the family and family resources. The fruits we see are that today’s Christian women are often ill-prepared to be Biblically obedient wives and mothers."
"The only reedeming feature about these neo anti-Christians is that there are so few of them and, hence, easily annihilable."
"Most afflictions like this are caused by sins committed while still inside the womb."
"All any terrorist has to do is drop large quantities of plutonium from airplanes onto American soil and it will render electricity completely useless."
It's hard to use electricity when you're busy dying unspeakably.

Labels: ,


posted at 12:54 AM

Friday, December 07, 2007

Mitt Romney sez . . .

"Don't ask, don't tell."

Labels: , ,


posted at 10:00 AM

Monday, December 03, 2007

It's hard to keep it all straight

Labels: , ,


posted at 9:45 PM

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

The path of the righteous is fraught with temptations, like nasty boys with bad foundations

Yesterday in the elevator two women were having a conversation about dating, and they agreed that it was better to start dating an atheist than someone from "an opposite religion". The reasoning was that you could potentially steer someone with no religious beliefs toward the correct path, whereas this would be more difficult to do when someone "had bad foundations".

So, for example, if a guy believed some crazy thing like justification by works, it would be challenging to date him if you had logical, true and correct beliefs, such as justification by faith.

Labels: ,


posted at 7:54 AM

Thursday, July 12, 2007

"Who was this man? Why did he live in a box? How did he get there? Would he have to stay in this box forever? WAS THIS BOX IN FACT HELL?!?!"

Nightline has just teased tomorrow's 20/20 "Hell: The Fear and Fascination", which promises to be painful in its own way. I particularly liked when the interviewer asked the unrepentant killer "Do you think you have a soul?" I think it was a rhetorical question.

Labels:


posted at 11:54 PM

Saturday, June 23, 2007

A little creepy, if you ask me

Here's a kind of column that I think would never appear in a Seattle paper. Appearing on the day its missing-mother subject, Jessie Marie Davis, has been found murdered, the piece commends "people" for searching and praying for Davis instead of dwelling on the sinful side of her life. And do you know what? "This is not an endorsement of out-of-wedlock births or adultery." Congratulations too for not stoning her to death, shunning her, etc.

I'm left with the impression that I would be thoroughly creeped out to live in a place like Akron, Ohio. It doesn't help that there is a little sidebar headed "More News from Topix.net" under which the only links are "African-American" and "Discuss African-American". There seems to be a subtext to the column, and it's not hard to see what it is when you notice that Davis is white and the father of her children (and, now, her confessed murderer) is black.

I do like the irony of a religion writer named "Terry Pluto".

Labels: , ,


posted at 3:39 PM

Monday, June 11, 2007

Timing vague, location certain

Another case arose when George Stephanopoulos of ABC News asked Mr. Romney about a Mormon teaching that Jesus will come to the United States when he returns to reign on earth. Mr. Romney responded that the Messiah will return to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, “the same as the other Christian tradition.”

Mr. Grover said some of his radio listeners were astounded.

“They were just in disbelief, saying that’s not true, Jesus is coming back to Missouri,” Mr. Grover said. “It’s the L.D.S. Church’s 10th article of faith that Zion will be built upon the American continent.” - New York Times, June 11, 2007
I love earnest religious arguments about what's going to happen in the future. After all, if there's one thing reasonable people really should agree about, it's stuff that hasn't happened yet.

Labels:


posted at 9:45 AM

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Where shall I point my truck?

The teaser for Wednesday night's "Nightline" ran like this: ". . . a Harvard professor's radical notion that morality is a matter not of philosophy but of biology. Are we born with an instinctive sense of what's right and wrong, with what many theologians would call a conscience?" Then they cut to the interview with the never-identified professor, who says:
If you contrast the judgments of people who claim to be atheists versus people who claim to be religious, have religious background, whatever that background is, you find no differences in the patterns of judgments.
I really don't even know where to begin with something like this. I'm amazed that people actually think—and many, many obviously do—that religious belief is some touchstone of morality, or that it is through religion that we learn morality. We are socialized from the youngest age in a million different ways that have nothing to do with religion, and demonstrating that (current, self-reported) religiosity doesn't affect patterns of moral judgment proves absolutely nothing about whether morality has a biological basis. The experiments required to determine whether human morality (ignoring the reductionist and question-begging nature of that term) has a biological basis would never be sanctioned. You would need experimental subjects uncontaminated by social influences, including parental influences, and the conditions for creating those subjects would constitute child abuse.

Also, it would fascinate me if some people's moral judgments were not closely tied to their particular religious beliefs and upbringing. You can't just disregard the sometime primacy of ideology. I really doubt that the professor would suggest that I could go into some different cultures of my choosing, ask people a question like "what should happen to adulterers?", and find "no differences in the patterns of judgments." In one place they will unlimber the stones and in another they will chuckle and mutter wryly in French.

Also, you have people's moral judgments and then you have what they say their moral judgments are. I doubt even a completely anonymous survey can eliminate the difference.

Also, if "we are born with an instinctive sense of what's right and wrong," you'd expect to see some evidence of it in very young children. Do you? I think not. We might just as well ask whether we are born with an instinctive ability to read.

I could go on. However, because of my lack of a sound religious upbringing, I have to go out now and do a couple of home invasions. More later, perhaps.

Labels:


posted at 12:05 AM

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

How low can you go?

The Vatican announced on Friday the results of a papal investigation of the concept of limbo. Church doctrine now states that unbaptized babies can go to heaven instead of getting stuck somewhere between heaven and hell. - Slate, April 23, 2007
I'm sorry, but this is simply comical. I don't understand how anyone can take these sorts of doctrines seriously. And isn't the Catholic Church supposed to know these sorts of things definitively, important things like the different available planes of existence in the afterlife? (Oh . . . that.) Papal investigation? Of something you have been telling people for centuries? What's next, transubstantiation isn't real? My coffee table doesn't contain a shard of the True Cross? Where does it all end?

Limbo strikes me as a theological "square root of -1". We can't have those unbaptized infants (and virtuous pagans!) having molten lead poured into all of their orifices for all eternity, but we can't let an unbaptized person into heaven either. So . . . violà!

One of the many things I've never understood is this . . . over here we've got our little allotted lifetimes . . . and over here we've got eternity. Logically, the one that is infinitely longer seems like it should be more important, perhaps even infinitely more important, than the little short one. But if you mess up during the little short corporeal existence, your fate is settled for all eternity and there is nothing you can do later on to make things better. What a coincidence that the short little corporeal existence is both the only thing we know for sure is real, and has absolutely critical importance in slotting us for all eternity.

Labels:


posted at 8:43 PM

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Meaning

In my opinion there is no religion able to give any meaning to events like yesterday's shootings. "To every season" really doesn't cut it. I can't imagine what it must be like to be constantly confronted by obvious signs that the universe is random, and needing to fit them all into my personal human-created belief system in order to preserve some sense that there is integrity and meaning to the universe, in the religious/teleological sense.

What solace would there be, really, in a religion that could explain yesterday, why children go insane or a hundred other horrors any honest person could rattle off in fifteen minutes? Where would the comfort come in?

Labels:


posted at 1:30 PM

Friday, February 16, 2007

Tell me about it

Watching that video...it's hard to believe this is the 21 century ! - Unironic posting, "End Times Chat" bulletin board of the website reaptureready.com

Labels: , ,


posted at 9:06 PM

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Oh, no! Not Jack Benny!

Many [evangelical Christians] tell me, "Mikey, OK, Anne Frank, Dr. Seuss, Jack Benny, Gandhi, they're all burning eternally in the fires of hell." - Salon, December 13, 2006
Much as I appreciate the randomness of throwing Jack Benny in there, I have my doubts that "many" Evangelicals are actually saying this to the guy.

It's amazing that three-fourths of Americans believe in Hell. Kind of makes you wonder what else they believe. If you believe in Hell, please leave me a comment and tell me three other "interesting" things you believe. To make it the most fun, make them things that you expect that I don't believe.

Labels: , ,


posted at 1:31 PM