With all the attention focused on Hillary and Obama, we are forgetting that “there’s another candidate in the race . . . one who is a, uh….republican”. . . .”his name is McCain, John McCain” . . .

Ed Note: YouTube took the video down but it can be seen via this link at The Daily Show site…
Jon Stewart: John McCain’s Sweet Talk Express Rolls Past the Media’s Lemming-like Claws

Why is Jonathan Falwell so down on America?

Well, it seems that Jerry Falwell’s son, Jonathan is following in his father’s footsteps of making illogical and idiotic arguments. Like so many fundies, Jonathan distorts the truth, pays no attention to history, makes claims with no evidence to support them. Too bad the legacy of bigotry and stupidity down in Lynchburg continues.

From Rob Boston of Americans United:

Falwell’s faulty logic: Lynchburg preacher says we’re all a bunch of crooks

The late Jerry Falwell’s son, Jonathan, is distraught over the state of our national ethics. In a recent column, he cited a report by the General Accounting Office (GAO) that found that some federal workers had illegally used tax funds to buy things like “Internet dating, tailor-made suits, lingerie [and] lavish dinners.”

[Ed. note: He conveniently leaves out the heads of evangelical organizations who are doing the same thing, using church donations illegally.]

No one in his or her right mind would defend such actions. The individuals who squandered these funds should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Interestingly, Falwell never actually endorses that idea. Rather, he uses the GAO report to launch into a tired screed asserting that America is dishonest, our country is terrible and on and on. He manages to blame all of this on court rulings upholding the separation of church and state and even manages to drag legal abortion into the discussion.

Why is Jonathan Falwell so down on America? Let him explain it: “First, I see the GAO report as being reflective of our nation’s continued departure from its Judeo-Christian heritage,” he moans. “This nation was founded on biblical principles, and those principles largely sustained us until about a half-century ago.”

He continues, “As our nation has turned away from (and even become hostile toward) the Ten Commandments and other biblical principles, we have seen our citizenry become progressively more dishonest and deceptive. Crime has risen, our schools have failed and our culture has become vulgar and crude. I believe it’s all related to the ouster of God from our schools, our media and our society.”

It’s nice that you believe that, Jonathan. How about some actual proof? Religious Right activists have for years blamed the school prayer decisions for everything from juvenile delinquency and divorce rates to alcoholism and the Kennedy assassination. They just assert it, never bothering to offer any evidence of the connection.

Anyone can play that game because correlation is not causation. I could point out, for example, that some the worst scandals to ever affect the federal government occurred during the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, periods where conservative Christianity held sway over society. At that time, many public schools had government-imposed prayer, Sunday-closing laws were the norm and religious groups had the power to censor books, magazines and other materials they deemed offensive. Yet we still had the Whiskey Ring and Teapot Dome scandals.

In the modern era, religious groups have in no way been immune from scandal. Several TV evangelists have been caught up in sex or money scandals, all while claiming to speak for God. And it isn’t just TV preachers. Jack Abramoff worked with Ralph Reed and “Lucky Louie” Sheldon, after all. (Ironically, Jonathan can hardly look to his own father for a moral example. During the 1990s, no lie was too outrageous for Jerry Falwell to spread if he thought it would help bring down Bill Clinton.)

Look at the Bush administration, the most “faith-based” in history. Claude Allen, assistant to the president for domestic policy, was caught cheating department stories in a glorified shoplifting scam. Tim Goeglein, deputy director of the White House’s Office of Public Liaison, resigned after it was revealed that he had plagiarized several newspaper columns. Regent University graduate Monica Goodling, deputy director of public affairs for the Department of Justice, was implicated in the scandal surrounding the firing of several U.S. attorneys.

All of these individuals were known for their self-professed piety. That did not stop them from suffering legal and ethical lapses.

The sad truth is that at any given point in history, there is a certain segment of the population so blinded by greed that they will engage in illegal activity. Some of these people are religious, others are not. Most Americans are decent and honest. The tiny portion who are not is the reason we have prisons.

Sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft. Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

“You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We’ve had a number of attempted lynchings. … You see them covered in marks after being beaten,” Kinshasa’s police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

“I’m tempted to say it’s one huge joke,” Oleko said.

“But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent. To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

“It’s real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny,” said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

Is this really 2008? I am sure you all will have fun with this one, too!

Well they did it…they dug him up and people are flocking to wish upon the corpse of a dead, once crazy self-mutilator who claimed to have wrestled with the devil and the Catolick church officials believe him.

We atheists recognize that Christianity is just a death cult in general, focused on life after death more than the here and now, but Catholics are especially morbid in the way they are obsessed with remains of dead people and creating icons and “false idols” to worship. Like the Golden Calf people made when Moses went up on the mountain and left them alone, since no god shows up to answer their prayers they turn then to dead saints to hear their prayers in hopes of the dead dude granting them like some genie in a cadaver. This is just more evidence that people make their own gods and put their hopes in things magical when earthly cures and answers are not found.

Thousands flock to exhumed body of saint Padre Pio

SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Italy (Reuters) - The exhumed body of Padre Pio, a saint considered a miracle worker by his devotees, attracted thousands of pilgrims on Thursday when it went on display 40 years after his death.

Padre Pio is one of the Catholic Church’s most popular saints and during his lifetime the Italian monk was said to have had the stigmata, the bleeding wounds of Jesus’ crucifixion on his hands and feet

Among the stories that surround the monk, who died at the age of 81, is one that he wrestled with the devil one night in his monastery cell and emerged bloodied and bruised.

However, he was dogged by accusations of fraud. A book last year suggested he was a self-harming man who might have used carbolic acid to cause his wounds. Church officials have denied he was a fake.

LINK TO FULL STORY

Addition: I found the video on YouTube

“His face was reconstructed with a lifelike silicone mask of the type used in wax museums because it was apparently too decomposed to show when the body was exhumed.”

It always interests me how the same arguments are pulled out against atheism. I mean, here’s a guy from Berkeley, who I’m sure is relatively intelligent, and then I read the following:

That led me to re-turn to one of C.S. Lewis’s finest books–and one of his first “Christian” ones–”The Problem of Pain.” And here’s the quote: “We ‘have all we want’ is a terrible saying when ‘all’ does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, ‘God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full—there’s nowhere for Him to put it.’” Lewis is simply right, and even though it’s a tough word, it’s a good one. As he concedes, “It does not matter that I know I must become, in the eyes of every hostile reader, as it were, personally responsible for all the sufferings I try to explain…. But it matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth.”

And I feel the same way. I’d suggest that looking at both the amount and distribution of natural and moral evils shows that this “too much on one’s plate” explanation is simply a vapid attempt that goes nowhere.

And then, if that wasn’t enough, I get to read — once again — the values argument from theism.

The existence of good—and the related realities of meaning, purpose, and beauty—present together an almost insoluble problem for the atheist. [...] Consider the words of Richard Dawkins, Oxford scientist, and bestselling author of The God Delusion: “In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” That’s a reasonably bleak portrayal of the universe, and, since we’re part of that universe, of our lives as well. It does, however, correspond perfectly with a basic conviction from Philosophy 101—“nothing comes from nothing.” Start with a purely physical system without any Creator, and all you have is brute fact. If the universe is simply a physical system, then why should something non-physical like good, meaning, purpose, or beauty arise? It cannot.

I’ll leave the “physical” and “non-physical” fallacies for the reader for homework.

And this is out of Berkeley?

[*sigh*]

Brazil priest carried aloft by balloons missing

SAO PAULO, Brazil - A Roman Catholic priest who floated off under hundreds of helium party balloons was missing Monday off the southern coast of Brazil.

Rescuers in helicopters and small fishing boats were searching off the coast of Santa Catarina state, where pieces of balloons were found.

Rev. Adelir Antonio de Carli lifted off from the port city of Paranagua on Sunday afternoon, wearing a helmet, thermal suit and a parachute.

He was reported missing about eight hours later after losing contact with port authority officials, according to the treasurer of his Sao Cristovao parish, Denise Gallas.

Gallas said by telephone that the priest wanted to break a 19-hour record for the most hours flying with balloons to raise money for a spiritual rest-stop for truckers in Paranagua, Brazil’s second-largest port for agricultural products.

Some American adventurers have used helium balloons to emulate Larry Walters — who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons.

A video of Carli posted on the G1 Web site of Globo TV showed the smiling 41-year-old priest slipping into a flight suit, being strapped to a seat attached to a huge column green, red, white and yellow balloons, and soaring into the air to the cheers of a crowd.

I know ya’ll have fun with this one.

When xians try to think, run for cover…

Church Sign Causes Controversy

Pastor Roger Byrd of Jonesville Church of God put the sign up which reads “Obama Osama humm are they brothers?” Pastor Byrd says the sign is not meant to be racial or political but rather to make people think. “His name is so close to Osama I have a feeling he might be Islamic therefore he doesn’t recognize Christ,” Pastor Byrd said. Barack attends Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Eugunia Foster is offended by the church sign. “I’m embarrassed and hurt. I’m surprised a small town like Jonesville still has this separation. It is racial and hatred,” Foster said. Pastor Byrd told News Channel 7 he would ask his congregation to vote on whether to keep the sign. They voted unanimously to keep the sign up Sunday night. Jonesville Church of God does not have any African American members.

Praise Be! Glory!

Last month, talking about the latest blowup in the Myers/Nisbet fight over framing, I wrote:

Now, when your opponent refuses to so much as engage in honest debate with you, you do have the option of explaining to the world once again why they’re wrong to do so, but a good “fuck you” really isn’t out of line.

Though I thought PZ was justified in what he said, I didn’t quite know first hand the hopeless anger he was feeling. Until today.

What triggered it? It was seeing this post by Chris Mooney. It starts off with a disingenuous “I merely report the facts” on the creationist documentary Expelled’s supposed success, and then follows up with a clearly editorializing “update” which says “Randy Olson, with whom I just went to see Expelled* here in LA, has more on why this film counts as a major success for the anti-evolution forces.” Follow the link to Olson’s post, and what do I see?:

To counter the blockbuster power of Expelled,* the National Science Foundation, NAS and AAAS are organizing a panel discussion about putting together a committee to look into the possibility of creating a brochure that tells the public how to make a website for a petition that says evolution is fun.

True, to my knowledge, the three mentioned organizations didn’t do much, but pro-science folks who specialize in fighting creationism have been doing everything they can to take on Expelled, first and foremost by creating and promoting a website that debunks the movies bogus claims (i.e. the site I’ve already linked three times in this post), but also posting independent criticisms of it. Olson’s post, along with the weird post script “Ben Stein says evolution is for losers, and nobody seems to be able to answer him,” mainly serve to denigrate what defenders of evolution have been doing. As with Nisbet, the main purpose seems to be self aggrandizement: Olson’s claim to fame is having made a movie about what bad communicators scientists are, and is clearly enjoying his “I told you so” moment.

Here’s some meta-constructive criticism for Olson: Go ahead, say you think more needs to be done to combat the lies peddled in Expelled. Go ahead, campaign to get the NSF, the NAS, and the AAAS to back what the NSCE is doing. Offer help to atheist student groups in organizing anti-Expelled events. Especially the Minnesota Group, they rock. [Though our rocking prowess doesn't match theirs, the group I'm involved with has spent time discussing Expelled with Christians.] Hold an emergency brainstorming session for internet activists, with emphasis on the emergency. [GisF readers: feel free to use this comments thread to brainstorm.] Use your knowledge of film making to create a short parody for YouTube. [Same goes for anyone reading this who does YouTube stuff.] But don’t denigrate hard-working defenders of evolution trying to fight Expelled. Don’t let what should be constructive criticism degenerate into fratricide.

*Needless to say, these links did not appear in the original Mooney/Nisbet posts.