Fundamentalist Religions create a Pit of Suffering for the Rest of Us

At some point in time, man invented the club and GAWD.  The two have been inseparable since then. Women, children and gay and “others’ have been the recipient of the combined force of blunt object and stupidity ever since.

All you have to do is spend a few minutes reading up on the “Values Voter” summit and watching the newscasts of protests at US and Western embassies around the world to realize it really is us against them. It’s those of us that live with two feet solidly in modernity, science, and reason and the people that just can’t seem to give up their extreme religious views. All of them are orgasmic over their pet version of some rabid end time scenario where they get proven right and every one else falls into a big old pit of suffering. They seem hell-bent–excuse the term–to end life as we know it. Frankly, I look at all of them and believe they have made a pit of suffering in this world, they wallow in it, and they intend to bring the rest of us into it.

We have to overcome.

This week the Popes of the Roman Catholic and the Coptic Orthodox Churches, Hillary Clinton, and other world leaders have been on TV trying to get people to calm down. That’s not what religious fundamentalists of all stripes actually want and it’s not going to stop until we separate religious expression that deserves protection from hate speech that provokes violence coming from people who use religion like Rush Limbaugh uses Oxycontin. It’s a display of mental illness and an addiction. Religion is the drug, the psychosis and the root of their angry, ignorant, deviant, and downright mean behavior. It makes me want to use the blinky-flashy thing on people and say there is no such thing as your GAWD to each and every one of them.

So, we’ve covered the embassy attacks this week.  We know it’s a complete mess over there.  Most of the folks over in the MENA region can’t even get a job, food on the  table, and any kind of education.  What’s the excuse of the Values Voters and folks like Paul Ryan and Rick Santorum?

Paul Ryan supposedly has an education and classes in economics.  You really wouldn’t know it from this: “Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan called the Federal Reserve’s latest effort to stimulate the economy “insidious” during a speech to Floridians on Saturday.”  Let me just say this.  Paul Ryan is insidious, insipid, immoral, and inspiring to only the craziest and most stupid of the crazy and stupid. He wants the rest of us to suffer for his ideology and political ambition.  Here’s his speech to the Summit of those who Value Hate and Ignorance.  These are the folks that should be airlifted to Tahrir Square to explain things to their Muslim stupid and crazy counterparts. These are the people that piss off Muslim fundamentalists.  It’s not the rest of us.  These are the people–and the man–who want to take away rights from living breathing women and give them to possibly viable fertilized eggs and even unfertilized eggs. These are the people that deny the humanity of our GLBT brothers and sisters. These are the people that say women ask for rape, call rape just another form of conception, and consider children victimized by incest to be less important than the fathering rights (e.g. property rights) of their attackers.

… nothing undermines the essential and honorable work of government more than the abuse of government power.

In the President’s telling, government is a big, benevolent presence – gently guiding our steps at every turn. In reality, when government enters the picture, private institutions are so often brushed aside with suspicion or even contempt.

This is what happened to the Catholic Church and Catholic Charities this past January, when the new mandates of Obamacare started coming. Never mind your own conscience, they were basically told, from now on you’re going to do things the government’s way.

Ladies and gentlemen, you would be hard pressed to find another group in America that does more to serve the health of women and their babies than the Catholic Church and Catholic Charities. And now, suddenly, we have Obamacare bureaucrats presuming to dictate how they will do it.

As Governor Romney has said, this mandate is not a threat and insult to one religious group – it is a threat and insult to every religious group. He and I are honored to stand with you – people of faith and concerned citizens – in defense of religious liberty.

Yes, nothing says liberty like forced pregnancy, forced & unnecessary vaginal probes, forced compliance with other people’s superstitions about birth control, forced propaganda sessions filled with lies about abortion, and forced death from laws enacted using other people’s religious tripe.   Nothing says liberty like withholding civil rights from people; like civil marriages.  Nothing says liberty like defining porn for every one else and defining the modicum of dress that is dowdy enough to hold back grown men from raping women and children. 

Exactly what is the christian version of a burkha?

When do we begin to run sex segregated buses in our urban areas so as not to offend orthodox jewish men that also appear unable to control their rapacious tendencies?  Notice that the majority of Israelis don’t agree or want this particular little extremist service either.  But, we have to surrender in the war on christmas and they have to acknowledge the prurient urges of guys stuck in the dark ages in the name of ‘religion’. Denying other people rights in the name of religion is not the same as protecting first amendment expression of religion.  It simply cannot be. Otherwise, I could yell Jayzeus says there’s “Fire” in this auditorium and laws wouldn’t apply to me.  It’s not like Simon sez.  Jayzeus said is not a get out of crime free card. Neither is Muhammed said or the Torah said or the Tree over there that tells me to paint myself blue and run amok.

A group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish millionaires is considering funding a private bus line in Israel that would enforce strict segregation between male and female passengers, an Israeli newspaper has reported.

The initiative follows public outrage at an incident where a secular Israeli woman refused to take a seat at the back of a public bus travelling to an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood in Jerusalem at the request of a religious male passenger.

The backers of the proposed project are looking at providing bus transportation in Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, Ashdod and Beit Shemesh as an alternative to Israel’s Egged bus service, which insists that any gender segregation on its buses must be voluntary, Israel’s daily Yediot Aharonot reported yesterday.

“The Haredi public doesn’t own the entire state,” Israel’s Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger was quoted as saying. “I support segregation, but only when it is done willingly. On private lines in which all the passengers are eager for separation, and the dignity of women is maintained, then that is a welcome initiative.”

Israel’s Transport Ministry has yet to respond to the request, and it remains unclear if the initiative will be approved, as Israel’s laws against discrimination demand that any provider of a public service must treat everybody equally, irrespective of gender, religion or ethnicity.

When does the religious bigotry and violent actions of these folks cease being a constitutional expression of religion?  At one point, Southerners were arguing that slavery was just a constitutionally protected expression of their christianity.  They said the same thing about not giving women the right to vote and repealing laws that made married women the property of their husband. They said the same thing about legalizing racially mixed marriages. Mormons argued the same thing whey the refused to give up polygamy. When do the rest of us get to rid ourselves of these backward, barbaric views that hide behind iron age religious practices? When can we take them all, give them iron age weapons, and drop the lot of them in some desert to find the end times on our  terms instead of theirs?

Here’s a Values of Hate Voter speech to think about. Rick Santorum actually confesses that “Smart People Will Never Be On Our Side”.  Hell, yeah!

Former presidential candidate Rick Santorum attacked the media and “smart people” for not being on the side of conservatives in a speech to the Values Voter Summit on Saturday.

“We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country,” Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, told the audience at the Omni Shoreham hotel. “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”

So true Rick.  Economists that don’t want to be guilty of malpractice will not be on the side of Romney or Ryan.  Doctors that don’t want to be guilty of malpractice will not be on your side either.  Neither will scientists who know that a creation myth is just a creation myth.  This brings me to another fantastic story about how dumb people can be when under the influence of fundamentalist religions. “Creationists Boycott Dr. Pepper over “Evolution of Flavor” Facebook Ad”

Several commenters, however, expressed disapproval of Dr. Pepper — believing, apparently, that the ad showed support for the scientific theory of evolution — and vowing to boycott the product. “I ain’t no freaking chimp. No more Dr Pepper for my household. God Bless y’all,” one user wrote. Another chimed in with, “I have lost all respect for Dr Pepper and if Dr Pepper wants business from thousands of people they will need to apologize.”

As the debate roiled on, pro-evolution commenters expressed their support of the company, vowing to stand by Dr Pepper no matter what. One person, for example, promised he’d continue drinking the soda even “if they announced they pissed in the formula.”

No matter what you believe regarding evolution, creationism, Christianity, Dr. Pepper, unicorns, cyborgs, narwhals or anything else, the campaign was a huge if inadvertent win for the soft drink company. As one Facebook commenter points out, “DR Pepper scored with this one. It’s all over the internet now. The Creationists just made this ad famous. Sweet, sweet irony.”

Yes.  Evolution means that people “evolved from chimps”.  A fertilized egg always implants and becomes a normal human baby.  Women don’t become pregnant in real rapes because of hormones their killer vaginas emit. I guess once you literally believe in Adam and Eve and a Garden of Eden–no matter what the flavor of Abrahamic religion you bought–your mind is susceptible to any old story.  Maybe that’s why Romney and Ryan think they can get away with so much lying. Values voters are gullible ignoramuses.

Here’s Bachmann’s brand of crazy.

“This was an intentional act that was done by radical Islamists who seek to impose their set of beliefs on the rest of the world and we will not stand for it,” Bachmann continued. “No one here is suggesting that all Muslims are radical but we should not be ignorant of the objective reality that there’s a very radical wing of Islam that’s dedicated to the destruction of America, of Israel, and Israel’s allies, and what we’re watching developing before our eyes today are the direct consequences of this administration’s policy of apology and appeasement across the globe.”

“I’m no master war strategist,” she said, but “appeasement doesn’t work.”

Bachmann also accused Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of pushing “enforced Islamic speech codes” in U.S. counterterrorism training materials, and sounded alarms about Egypt’s ruling party, the Muslim Brotherhood, before urging the president to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to stand in solidarity with Israel.

Bachmann, of course, feels its just hunky dory to force her brand of what-ever-it is on us through laws and coercion.  I noticed she didn’t rail on about GLBTs this time.  Perhaps Marcus sashayed away with that page of her speech.

So, Bachmann isn’t aware she’s the American equivalent of bat shit crazy fundamentalist. Here’s some of the company she keeps.

Last night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow called out Paul Ryan for speaking at the Values Voter Summit and lending credibility to the bigotry and pure crazy on display at the conference. Her report provided crucial context on the extremists who are appearing at the conference – something that has been sorely lacking in most media coverage so far.

Maddow paid particular attention to three anti-Muslim activists that we regularly cover – Jerry Boykin, Kamal Saleem and Frank Gaffney. As I said yesterday, the Values Voter Summit is making a mockery of diplomacy and the threat of terrorism by featuring Saleem, who has made a career for himself as a fake former terrorist, and Boykin and Gaffney, who are leading forces behind the Huma Abedin smear and helped spark anti-American protests in Egypt.

It’s time we start treating some of this as something other than ‘religion’.  Here’s some up-and-comers and their agenda of hate from Salon. I’ve just put number one here.

Mat Staver is the  fiercely anti-gay chairman of the Liberty Counsel and dean of the Liberty University Law School, which are both connected to the late Jerry Falwell. Staver has accused the Obama administration of running an “affirmative action” program to get Muslims into top national security positions, thus helping the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrate the top levels of the U.S. government. He’s also argued that the Obama administration has been pushing “in-your-face forced abortion funding, in-your-face forced homosexuality,” and that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which protects gays and lesbians in the workplace, “will put individuals at risk and ultimately result in significant damage and even death of some individuals.”

You just have to wonder what rock these people crawled out from and how human evolution left them so far behind.