This is getting to be like Jesus Matrix! So many claiming to be Jesus, and so many sheeple who will believe them. And when you get rid of one, more just come out of the woodwork. Never ending supply of Jeebus nutjobs.

Wayne Bent of New Mexico is yet another one claiming to be Jesus. He is going through the whole martyr act, fasting and refusing to eat, and claiming total innocence. He is accused of laying naked with underage virgins. He has also admitted to having sex with a couple of married women and another woman who is “of-age” (which he claims was instructed by Gawd…yeah…ok).

One thing in this news video that got me is how the son of Mr. Bent says that the authorities have “stepped over the line, by forcing children to go into an environment they do not want to go into. Yet these children have been forced to remain isolated in a compound and brainwashed to believe this is where they should be and that there is nothing wrong with sleeping naked with a creepy old fuck.

What will happen to all of these kids when they finally grow up?

Church leader arrested on sex charges in northeast N.M.

A posting attributed to Bent on the church’s Web site Monday said:

“Jesus had not committed any crimes, so the authorities had to invent some crimes to crucify him over. It is the same for me also. I have committed no crimes, but many crimes are being imagined and concocted in the minds of men to try and kill me again.”

Latest news video link: Strong City Cult

“There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.”  - David Hume

Again, I approach the teleological argument, aka the fined-tuned universe (or what I amusingly term, the ‘argument from long odds’).

We’ve all no doubt heard the worn canard, “The odds of our universe being able to support life are 10 to the 86th power” or some such twaddle.

What intelligent creature (outside of the addicted gambler) actually stacks the odds against itself? Doesn’t this run contrary to anything vaguely resembling sense? (I’ll refrain from saying ‘common’, because as Voltaire noted so aptly, “I do not know why they call it common sense, as it is not so common”.) I maintain that in fact, you have to have some other criterion - all these formulations are from one side of a fence only. Where is the criterion, then? Do we have other universes to compare to? If we had actual access to another universe, completely devoid of life, then there’d be something to compare our own against. Until then, this is idle speculation. Billions of years multiplied by billions of planets would produce some kind of spark, I’d bet.

(NOTE: am borrowing this from Hume, in my own clumsy way.)

Another hoary old chestnut is the “look at how complex life is! How could it be so, without someone designing it?” Then ensues the battle - the theist will round up some irrelevant figure, about how the human cell contains more info than the Encyclopedia Britannica or somesuch. Billions of years, compounded simplicity, anyone?

I say this: the diversity of life, the complexity of the cell, is a severe argument against intelligent design.

Occam’s own razor prevents it.

Cogitate on this: if an ‘intelligent designer’ who is all-knowing, omnipotent, all-powerful, designed the world as we know it, why are there so many errors and misses? Why were the dinosaurs even brought about? There were even human species that died off. It’s as if some blind mad scientist was using this world as a petrie dish, for some vague purpose beyond our comprehension.

(Oh, wait: I imagine I hear the burbling bullshit of apologists in the peanut gallery, preparing their cant, spouting their presuppositional silliness with such platitudes as “the ways of gawd are mysterious” or some other non-answer.) Do we have a concrete number as to how many misses there were, prior to hitting the bull’s eye with our existence? A million? A billion?

“So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.” - Asimov, Nightfall.

Till the next post then.

Michelle Duggar caused quite a stir in the news media when she gave birth to her 17th child not that long ago. I posted about it in this story: “Quiverfull as God allows.”

Michelle Duggar continues to be “quiverfull” for the Lord”

Happy Mother’s Day: Woman pregnant with 18th child

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - It’s a happy Mother’s Day for an Arkansas woman — she’s pregnant with her 18th child.

Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year’s Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins.

“We’ve had three in January, three in December. Those two months are a busy time for us,” she said, laughing.

The Duggars’ oldest child, Josh, is 20, and the youngest, Jennifer, is nine months old.

The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are home-schooled.

Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health.

The new show looks at life inside the Duggar home, where chores — or “jurisdictions” — are assigned to each child. One episode of the new show involves a “jurisdiction swap,” where the boys do chores traditionally assigned to the girls, and vice versa, Duggar said.

“The girls swapped jurisdictions, changing tires, working in the garages, mowing the grass,” she said. “The boys got to cook supper from start to finish, clean the bathrooms,” among other chores.

Duggar said she’s six weeks along and the pregnancy is going well. She and her husband, Jim Bob Duggar, said they’ll keep having children as long as God wills it.

“The success in a family is first off, a love for God, and secondly, treating each other like you want to be treated,” Jim Bob Duggar said. “Our goal is for each one of our children to be best friends, and everybody working together to serve each other makes that happen.”

The other Duggar children, in between Joshua and Jennifer, are Jana, 18; John-David, 18; Jill, 16; Jessa, 15; Jinger, 14; Joseph, 13; Josiah, 11; Joy-Anna, 10; Jeremiah, 9; Jedidiah, 9; Jason, 7; James, 6; Justin, 5; Jackson, 3; and Johannah, 2.

They just keep plopping out babies because they believe it’s the Lawd’s will, but what about this “free will” and personal choices that Xians say they have? To me, this is highly irresponsible, and selfish. Why not adopt some of those children out there who need homes if you have so much desire to have children? Why does not their God call them to take in the needy and homeless children of our country instead of mindlessly plopping out more and more of their own?

Maybe it’s not so mindless. Maybe they are doing it for money and publicity? This comment might explain it all:

Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health.

I wonder how much they get paid for that?

There are many good reasons why religion belongs in the home and churches, and not in the academic setting. One of them being that it violates the law of separation of church and state. Another reason is when public schools get into the business of encouraging or sponsoring prayer, Bible reading and other religious activities, it is usurping a role reserved for churches and religious institutions. But most of all, public schools should stay out of the religion business because it is divisive and counterproductive to a school’s core mission of education.

Things get complicated since this is a diverse nation of many religious beliefs (and many with no religious beliefs or affiliations). When attention is given to one particular belief over another, then resentment ensues and division. How can we teach tolerance for one another’s beliefs while giving special attention to some and not others? And if schools try to balance religious education and to give each religion equal time, academics gets lost. Leave religion to the churches, temples and synagogues, and keep it out of our public school systems.

Discord Among Ohio Students Shows Need For School Neutrality On Religion

Now lines are being drawn at the school. Students are attacking one another on the basis of religion.

Link to full article by Rob Boston

Video update on Ohio teacher who violated 1st Amendment

Jeez, all this hostility on this blog. Why are atheists so angry?…

McCain’s Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam

The leader of a 12,000-member congregation, Parsley has written several books outlining his fundamentalist religious outlook, including the 2005 Silent No More. In this work, Parsley decries the “spiritual desperation” of the United States, and he blasts away at the usual suspects: activist judges, civil libertarians who advocate the separation of church and state, the homosexual “culture” (”homosexuals are anything but happy and carefree”), the “abortion industry,” and the crass and profane entertainment industry. And Parsley targets another profound threat to the United States: the religion of Islam. In a chapter titled “Islam: The Deception of Allah,” Parsley warns there is a “war between Islam and Christian civilization.” He continues: I cannot tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam, that we see it for what it really is. In fact, I will tell you this: I do not believe our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore.[…] Parsley claims that Islam is an “anti-Christ religion” predicated on “deception.” The Muslim prophet Muhammad, he writes, “received revelations from demons and not from the true God.” And he emphasizes this point: “Allah was a demon spirit.” […] At the end of his chapter on Islam, Parsley asks, “Are we a Christian nation? I say yes.” Without specifying what actions should be taken to eradicate the religion, he essentially calls for a new crusade. Parsley, who refers to himself as a “Christocrat,” is no stranger to controversy. In 2007, the grassroots organization he founded, the Center for Moral Clarity, called for prosecuting people who commit adultery. In January, he compared Planned Parenthood to Nazis. In the past Parsley’s church has been accused of engaging in pro-Republican partisan activities in violation of its tax-exempt status.

I don’t know about all you non-believers. You’re all way too hostile, and you just don’t understand the right path.

Many of our problems on this planet are human fault. Gotta have our big cars, gotta have all our electricity, our garbage piles high. We don’t think about it because we won’t be here…let the next generations worry about it. People killing other people. Greed. War. Violence. All caused by humans and only humans can change all this. No god is going to clean up the mess.

Nature is at “fault” of most natural disaster. It’s just the way things are. NO god causes these things, no god prevents them. They just happen and no help comes from any god to clean up the mess. No messes get cleaned up unless humans intervene and take action. No god waves a magic wand and makes things all better. No god cures the cancers and disease in little children and adults, no god feeds those who are starving to death in third world countries and no god prevents the exploitation of the poor and impoverished. No god keeps a president and leaders of nations from starting wars and killing innocent people who have no say in the matter. No god prevents perverts from molesting and murdering children. No god stops the gangs from murdering, stealing and killing each other. No god comes. Humans struggle to find cures for disease. Humans attempt to fix what other humans destroy. Humans strive to sort out the messes other humans make. But no god causes it, no god cleans up the messes. . . and . . .

only humans can save humanity.

Natural disaster could become catalyst to blow away injustice

Even at the best of times, the Irrawaddy delta is one of the least accessible areas of one of South-East Asia’s most closed and impenetrable countries. […] It is too soon to know the extent of the destruction, but there is no longer any doubt that a massive humanitarian catastrophe has struck Burma. Cyclone Nargis, with its 120mph winds, coincided with a 12ft-high storm surge. Even last night there was little hard information about the extent of the damage but it seems clear that fields, houses, roads, ditches, houses and entire communities have been blown and washed away. […] The numbers of injured, it can be assumed, are several multiples of the dead. The numbers of homeless are unknown — the best that Richard Horsey, a United Nations official in Thailand, could guess was several hundred thousand “but how many hundred thousand we just don’t know”. A World Food Programme official said that 90 per cent of houses in the worst-affected zone were destroyed. No one in Burma has seen a natural disaster like this in living memory. But this is a catastrophe whose consequences do not end with the dead and injured. Its ripples will be felt across the region and it has the potential, at least, to reshape the entire country. Apart from the loss of life, the injuries and the destruction of tens of thousands of homes, the disaster may have far-reaching secondary effects. The flooding and destruction of sanitation systems increase the risk of epidemics, including malaria and typhoid; the loss of livelihoods is crippling in communities where many people subsist on less than $1 a day.

Oh, yes, let’s kill the most knocked-down, oppressed, and downtrodden — and, further, let’s kill them in highly remote areas.

How unbelievably loving…

Further reading, for anyone interested…

The Atheist Jew sent me this asshattery for all of you to “critique”. We rejoice when people like Falwell go to meet their imaginary maker, but when one crazy evangelist dies, another just fills in his place. Ravi Zacharias says no atheist can defeat him in debate and he always wins the argument. That’s because no matter who really has the better argument, he declares himself the winner despite his lack of actual evidence for the existence of his god, just like a typical fundie.

Who is Ravi Zacharias you might ask? Jeffrey J. Lowder writes: “Ravi Zacharias, the former Hindu-turned-Christian apologist, is President of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, an organization dedicated to “presenting the credibility of Christianity as the only reasonable option by which people should live.”

Ravi Zacharias says,

“It is a mindless philosophy that assumes that one’s private beliefs have nothing to do with public office. Does it make sense to entrust those who are immoral in private with the power to determine the nation’s moral issues and, indeed, its destiny? …. The duplicitous soul of a leader can only make a nation more sophisticated in evil.”

Well, we have a President who many evangelicals believe holds higher moral standards and look where that got us.

I am sure you will have a lot to say to dispute this video. It was very difficult for me to watch the whole thing without my blood boiling. Zacharias and others like him attempt to intellectualize absurd religious beliefs and are maddening the way they pompously proclaim victory while offering no evidence except his bullshit rhetoric. Apologists are the most annoying to debate because they are so “smug” in the way they try to woo us with their “intellect”.