evil
pharyngula | July 26, 2011Scum of the earth. Parts of Michele Bachmann's district contain the most smug, pious, conservative rat-buggering jerks on the planet (like Marcus Bachmann and his anti-gay "clinic", for instance). And the symptoms are beginning to show: the Anoka-Hennepin school district, part of Bachmann's domain, home of the Elmer Gantry-wannabe Bradley Dean, is also the epicenter of an epidemic of teen suicides, 9 in the last two years. These are kids who were bullied for being gay, or suspected of being gay, or not fitting in to the their inbred little community (and who would want to?), and the school…
pharyngula | July 23, 2011You can now find a ghastly manifesto, purportedly by Anders Behring Breivik, on the web. The guy was delusional and insane: it's an incoherent 1500 pages long, and it reads like an obsessively fussed-over set of rules for a nerdy fantasy role-playing game…except, of course, that this lunatic thought it was real and charged off to murder people.
He claims to be a Justiciar Knight, part of a new organization called PCCTS.
Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici - PCCTS (the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon), the Knights Templar was re-founded in London in…
pharyngula | July 11, 2011I hope this is something we can all agree on. Today is the The International Day against Stoning, a consciousness-raising event organized by Mina Ahadi, Patty Debonitas, and Maryam Namazie to call attention to the fact that some countries still practice public stonings as punishments for petty offenses against propriety. There are people in prison right now, awaiting that day when authorities drag them into the public square and people murder them by battering them with rocks.
As you know Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani is still languishing in prison. The authorities recently mentioned her case…
pharyngula | July 9, 2011People keep telling me that I have to read up more on real theology, you know, the stuff where smart old white guys sit around in seminaries and invent rationalizations for whatever the hell they want to believe. Unfortunately, I don't see any difference in principle (but hopefully, in outcome) between what, for instance, elders of the Mormon church or Catholic bishops say, than the ideas of Peter Lucas Moses, who has his own special interpretation of God's holy word.
A religious leader in North Carolina shot to death his four-âyear old step son because he thought the boy, Jadon Higganbothan…
pharyngula | June 9, 2011Amina is the young Syrian woman who was threatened with rape by Islamist thugs. She disappeared a few days ago.
Earlier today, at approximately 6:00 pm Damascus time, Amina was walking in the area of the Abbasid bus station, near Fares al Khouri Street. She had gone to meet a person involved with the Local Coordinating Committee and was accompanied by a friend.
Amina told the friend that she would go ahead and they were separated. Amina had, apparently, identified the person she was to meet. However, while her companion was still close by, Amina was seized by three men in their early 20's.…
pharyngula | May 18, 2011The essay starts off stupidly enough.
In 1867 Karl Marx dedicated DasKapital to Charles Darwin.
Actually, no, he didn't. It's a fairly common lie in creationist circles, though, just like the others sprinkled throughout the story.
Modern creation science is led by an array of top-flight Ph.D. scientists, including biochemists, paleontologists, astronomers and geologists. It presents a formidable battery of evidence now knocking hundreds of holes in traditional evolutionary arguments. As never before, scientific creationism debunks the contrived "evidence" that evolutionary theory has fed on…
pharyngula | May 9, 2011Those are ominous words. Brian and Shannon Gore have been arrested after police, investigating evidence that Shannon Gore had been selling stolen goods, found their 5 or 6 year old daughter caged in their trailer home, gnawing on her own skin.
Then they found the body of another child buried under a shed.
Fine upstanding members of the Christian community, they are.
I don't consider every Christian to be a child-torturing murderer, but one thing I wish we could get across is that church attendance has nothing to do with morality or ethical behavior or goodness of any kind. So why do so many…
pharyngula | April 7, 2011Another madman has run wild, this time in Brazil, killing 11 schoolchildren and wounding another 13 before killing himself (and here's the story in Portuguese, with many photos, including a few that are grislier than you'll see in the US media). The killer left a suicide note, and a Brazilian reader sent me his translation:
First of all you should know that the impure can't touch me without
gloves, only the chaste or the the ones that lost their chastity after their
marriages and haven't been adulterous may touch me with no gloves,
i.e., no fornicator or adulterer may have direct contact with…
pharyngula | January 27, 2011Uganda is currently undergoing conflict over civil rights: a number of influential Christians in the country, under the influence of American evangelicals like Scott Lively and Rick Warren, have been pushing to have homosexuality condemned and people who love other people of the same sex arrested or executed. It's an ugly place where the dreams of the Christian right are actually being realized, but of course our evangelical leaders are denying their responsibility. Just last night on CNN I caught a bit of a nauseating interview with Joel Osteen, the smirking prosperity gospel pitchman, and…
pharyngula | January 20, 2011I have been receiving lots of triumphant mail from anti-choice people claiming vindication, that abortion is wrong, and demanding to know how I can possibly support abortion rights after hearing about the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell ran an abortion mill in Philadelphia, and was a hack who maimed and killed women while doing abortions on demand, for a substantial fee. He was unqualified, uncertified in obstetrics and gynecology, and his facility was unmonitored and relatively uninspected. He gave untrained, inexperienced staff critical jobs in the surgery — he allowed a 15 year old high…
pharyngula | January 5, 2011The infamous Andrew Wakefield study that claimed to find a link between autism and vaccinations is still being scrutinized, and the latest investigation has uncovered evidence of faked data.
A new examination found, by comparing the reported diagnoses in the paper to hospital records, that Wakefield and colleagues altered facts about patients in their study.
The analysis, by British journalist Brian Deer, found that despite the claim in Wakefield's paper that the 12 children studied were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems. Deer also…
pharyngula | November 15, 2010This is a very grim video; the myth of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion still lives on Muslim television. When it starts, you might be able to laugh a bit — did you know the Jews drain the blood of young boys to make matzoh balls? — but by the end, where some evil cleric is gloating over old footage of dead and dying Jews in Nazi prison camps ("look at the corpses, Allah be praised!") and that he hopes the followers of Allah will be the next to carry out this holy work, I give you fair warning that you might well be too sickened to continue.
New Trends in Arabic Anti-semitism from Henrik…
pharyngula | October 4, 2010Eric Dejaeger is a Catholic priest and pedophile who benefited greatly from church policy: when it was learned that he was a child-raping monster, the Catholic Church did the upright, moral thing and kept him on as a priest, but simply shipped him off to the Canadian north where he'd only be raping the Inuit. When the law caught up with him even in that remote place, he fled…and guess where he found shelter and employment? Back in the arms of Mother Church, of course.
The Belgian-born priest, who became a Canadian citizen in 1977, is wanted for three counts of indecent assault on a male and…
pharyngula | August 6, 2010History is not going to judge us kindly for this crime against humanity. Never again.
In the following waves [after the initial blast] people's bodies were terribly squeezed, then their internal organs ruptured. Then the blast blew the broken bodies at 500 to 1,000 miles per hour through the flaming, rubble-filled air. Practically everybody within a radius of 6,500 feet was killed or seriously injured and all buildings crushed or disemboweled.
Japanese doctors said that those who had been killed by the blast itself died instantly. But presently, according to these doctors, those who had…
stoat | July 28, 2010As discussed by Viz in the August 2010 edition, #197:
Paul has more useful discussion, but Viz is funnier.
pharyngula | July 27, 2010This is a rather horrifying article about young girls reading Harry Potter one moment, and then dragged off to get their clitorises chopped off. It's got these nasty little details like, if you pay extra, you can get the butcher to use a clean knife.
But there's an odd disjoint here, too. It's the UK, a modern western nation. They have laws to prohibit mangling children.
The UK Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985 makes it an offence to carry out FGM or to aid, abet or procure the service of another person. The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, makes it against the law for FGM to be…
pharyngula | July 22, 2010How about breast ironing? When I first read about it, I wondered how it would even do anything — but then you discover that they heat stones until they're hot enough to cause pain, and press these instruments of torture to their chest daily for months. And who carries out this sadistic abuse? Their loving mothers. To make them unattractive to men, who might otherwise get them pregnant.
Don't watch the video if the sight of scarred breasts bother you.
One in four girls in Cameroon are having this done. It seems to me that sex education and prophylactics would be the less destructive way to…
pharyngula | July 17, 2010
If you do nothing else. Please take a moment and sign the Petition.http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/stop...http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/s...Contact information for e-mailing the White house.http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/And the President of Iranhttp://cp.president.ir/en/His e-mail (possibly)dr-ahmadinejad@president.irhttp://www.siawi.org/article882.htmlAnd some other details that might helphttp://www.gopetition.com/petitions/s...Currently there are only 427 signatures on this site. I am sure there are other Petitions out there. I think making people aware is the most important…
pharyngula | July 13, 2010Nope, I'm going to call this story debunked. A commenter has pointed out that Jhelum has several established Christian communities and is not the monolithic Islamic city the story implies, so it looks like this is a complete fabrication by Compass Direct News, a Christian propaganda outfit. The only stories here are that Christians lie to feed their martyr complex, and sometimes I'm fooled.
Jamshed Masih is a police officer in Pakistan who also happens to be a Christian. He transferred to a town dominated by the local Muslim cleric, Maulana Mahfooz Khan. In a story that sounds like the…
pharyngula | July 13, 2010Molly Norris, the cartoonist who launched "Draw Mohammed Day" (and who later withdrew herself from the event, citing her fear of persecution) has just been put on a hit list, calling for Muslims to murder her.
The man calling for her death is this Yemeni cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, a pleasant looking fellow who also cheerfully encouraged the Fort Hood massacre. You wouldn't know it to look at him, but behind that smiling face is the mind of a hateful monster.
He's from the US. He claims to have served as an imam in California, Colorado, and Virginia. And now he's holed up in Yemen, advocating…