Freethinker Sermonettes
revere | January 27, 2008Rudolph "9/11" Giuliani is banking on the good Republicans in Florida to save his sorry ass in the primary. Given the gang of bottom feeders running in that Party's primary, you wonder how anyone could be stupid enough to vote in it, but there is ample evidence that they exist a-plenty in Florida. I don't mean to pick on Florida. People with barely two neurons to rub together seem to be everywhere. They even have their own TV network, Fox. That way when MyFoxOrlando gestates a particularly redolent fecal load, they can relieve themselves through still other orifices -- MyFoxColorado, for…
revere | January 20, 2008The historical Jesus -- if there was a person of that name and generally received description -- was apparently a rich white guy. That's according to an authority, the Rev. Creflo Dollar of the World Changers Church International in College Park, Ga. He probably feels a kinship to Jesus, being a rich whiteblack guy himself. [Correction: Big mistake on my part. Creflo is a black scoundrel, not a white one. Just goes to show you the power of stereotypes! Thanks to commenter hardindr for pointing this out. ] Creflo drives a Rolls Royce and has big houses in Georgia and New York. He's also a…
revere | January 13, 2008The number of Americans who never go to a church, synogogue or mosque is at a record level -- 22%, according to a survey done for the Southern Baptist Convention. The attitude toward religion also isn't very friendly among these so-called "unchurched": 72% say the church is "full of hypocrites" and 44% agree with the statement, "Christians get on my nerves." The survey was done last spring and summer. I doubt it looks much better (for the Baptist Convention, that is), today.
22% would be a much higher number for non-believers than any other survey and indeed, these aren't all non-believers.…
revere | January 6, 2008Jonathan Luxmoore of the Catholic News Service doesn't respect me, I guess. He thinks I'm a hypocrite because I said I liked Christmas although I'm an atheist. Well, Ex-CUSE . ME:
Sir,
I may not be alone in detecting a case of having your Christmas cake and eating it in David Aaronovitch's defence of carol-singing atheists (Comment, Dec 20) and accompanying letters. I find it hard to respect anyone who proclaims their atheism with missionary zeal, and then happily joins in singing such lines as "O Come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord", however agreeable they may find the experience.
If you…
revere | December 30, 2007One of my guilty pleasures used to be indulging in End-of-the-Year wrap-ups on network news. I'm not exactly sure why and it's been decades since I've enjoyed what has become a sterile exercise in hindsight spin doctoring. There are still specialized areas, though, where the judgments of the cognoscenti are still interesting to me. One of them is religion. What do religion journalists consider the big stories of the past year? A comparison of the "Top Ten Stories" in 2005, 2006 and 2007 according to Christianity Today presents a picture that is, dare I say it, Enlightening. (NB: The Top Ten…
revere | December 23, 2007PZ and Greg Laden have 'fessed up and long time readers know I write the same thing on my Sermonette each Christmas: I am a big fan of Christmas, godless bastard that I am. It is my favorite secular holiday and there is hardly anything about it I don't like. Well, there are a few things: like the whining about how commercial it has become and how its "true meaning" has gotten lost. Why do I like Christmas so much?
I want to preface this by saying there are valid reasons some people hate Christmas. It's a dark and gloomy time of year in the northern hemisphere and some people react badly.…
revere | December 16, 2007I'll give the clergy one thing: sermonizing can be hard work. Not always, of course. Some politicians and religious figures do it effortlessly, without thought, so to speak. Maybe I should leave off "so to speak." Without thought. Sometimes, though, it's hard to think of what to say on Sunday. But today isn't one of them. There was so much good material over the last week, choosing was difficult. Would it be the vacationers in Australia who got drunk together and started to argue evolution versus creationism? The English creationist wound up killing the Scottish biomedical scientist with a…
revere | December 9, 2007Mitt Romney's "Mormons are Christians -- really!" speech ("I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind."), also established that non-believers are not Americans -- really!
And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion -- rather, we welcome our nation's symphony of faith.
And what about those of us who don't kneel in prayer to the Almighty? We don't have friend…
revere | December 2, 2007It's Sunday but, alas, no rest for me. I'm off on a jet plane (I hope I know when I'll be back again). But it's still important to preach my Sermonette. Too many of you already know the classic George Carlin rant on religion as bullshit (if you don't, you can watch it on YouTube here), but there's another Carlin favorite not as well known. The Ten Commandments on a diet. Enjoy:
revere | November 18, 2007The religious are all a-twitter these days about "the New Atheism," usually referring to polemics by the likes of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens et al. I doubt most atheists have read these books (why should they?) and while I'd like to think they have converted many of the faithful, I rather doubt that, too. They are not a cause but a sign of the times. The two most powerful forces stimulating the new and higher public status of non-belief are 9-11 and Creationism, both for the same reasons: they are graphic illustrations of the evils of religious fanaticism and delusion. Once a person starts to…
revere | November 11, 2007With the Kentucky general election a day away, the administration of Governor Ernie Fletcher wasted not time getting the Ten Commandments posted on state property in the wake of a judge's ruling allowing it as part of a display of donated "historical documents" that included the Magna Carta and the Kentucky Constitution. To the Governor the ruling must have truly seemed Heaven Sent. He was in a hard fought battle for re-election and in his State of the Commonwealth address in 2006, Fletcher contended that:
. . . under Kentucky law, teachers already have the freedom to teach "intelligent…
revere | November 4, 2007So many movies. So little time. What I needed was a guide to tell me what I can safely watch without putting my immortal soul in danger. And I've found just the thing: Movieguide: A Biblical Guide to Movies, Entertainment and Culture for Families. But to my horror, I've already seen some of the movies that could damn me to eternal suffering:
Ever since the critical and box office success of movies like Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," the atheist, left-wing elitists in the mass media have stepped up their attacks on the patriotic, traditional and orthodox values…
revere | October 28, 2007A Jewish website has an interesting critique of the new popularity of
the current spate of books on atheism (I refuse to call it the New
Atheism; there's nothing new, different or unusual about it except
that a lot of people are reading it). The argument is this: the
"militancy" of the new books is a ready-made scapegoat for a
"crumbling moral landscape." The germ of a good idea is never
followed up, however. Instead of discussing the crumbling moral
landscape itself (an idea we shouldn't take for granted but examine
critically), Rabbi Steven Pearce instead turns his venom on the
scapegoats.…
revere | October 21, 2007Game Day. Don't pester God with petty Life and Death stuff. He's ready for some football!. And why not? Players on both sides pray to Him, credit Him with their touchdowns, sacks, interceptions. None ever blame Him for their Mistakes. It's all good stuff. What's not to like? Football's Biggest Fan. And his favorite team? Your team. The team from your local area.
That's not all. God is an Awesome Team Physician:
Detroit quarterback Jon Kitna expected people to snicker and laugh when they heard his explanation for his comeback against Minnesota after getting knocked out of the game with a…
revere | October 14, 2007It's no secret atheists have an image problem in the US. That seems to be improving. What isn't improving is the public's view of Christianity. Young folks look around them and get the message. Christianity is a religion. Just like other religions. And that isn't such a good recommendation. The Barna Group supports religion, specifically, Christianity. They also do polling. I can't vouch for their methods, but the latest poll should give pause to the adherents of the Christian religion (one among many, remember):
Barna polls conducted between 2004 and this year, sampling 440 non-Christians (…
revere | October 7, 2007Last week someone by the name of Theo Hobson expelled a hard, dry turd onto the pages of The Guardian:
Richard Dawkins wants America's atheists to stand up and be counted. He wants them to form a lobby that's capable of challenging the religious culture they inhabit. He says that about 10% of the nation is atheist - if these godless millions unite, then they can begin to influence national politics. Dawkins has even tried to start the ball rolling, by launching a movement called the Out Campaign.
[snip]
[Quoting Dawkins] "When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has…
revere | September 30, 2007Last week about 50 Boulder High School students walked out of class rather than recite the Pledge of Allegiance with the words "one nation, under God" in it. They wanted to recite their own version, cleansed of the offending phrase. I have a better idea, but first here's what happened in Boulder:
About 50 Boulder High School students walked out of class Thursday to protest the daily reading of the Pledge of Allegiance and recited their own version, omitting "one nation, under God."
The students say the phrase violates the constitutional separation of church and state.
They also say the daily…
revere | September 23, 2007Sometimes you read things in the newspaper that leave you gasping for air. Religious twaddle is a never ending source of this kind of crap, so you'd think I would be immune. The particular pathology I present to you today isn't even near the top of the steaming pile of shit that newspapers print as if they were scraps of coherent thought, but for some reason it hit some kind of resonant frequency in my patience circuit, threatening to tear it apart. It appeared in the North West Arkansas News in Mr. John Terry's (economist/minister/veteran) column, On the Economy:
Not long ago the Arkansas…
revere | September 16, 2007This little rant has been around for a while, but since it can't be said too often, I'll let Marcus Brigstocke say it again. Seven minutes of Truth: