Bay of Fundie

This is an extremely occasional feature that I only run when I remember I have it, and when somebody posts an exceptionally insightful comment. I like to elevate that comment to the top, so everyone can see it.

Today I’m bringing two comments to your attention. Both are by anti_supernaturalist.

His first comment was in response to “Obama Aborts Osama”:

• Pro-birth ideology poses an international public health threat

Religious anti-abortion ranters are not pro-life. They are pro-birth. There’s a big difference.

By dismissing women’s rights over their own bodies, fundies expect to regain control over reproduction and birth in accord with pro-natalist dictates. Pro-natalism, a term from the 19th century, sells a poisonous nostrum of sexual customs which do not belong in a contemporary planet-wide ethos which must treat women equally.

Fundie pretensions to secular power over abortion are not pro-life. They demand enforcement of ancient (and modern) near-eastern cult practices which amount to total reproductive repression: that no impediment whatsoever on births be permitted by law.

No sexual practices which preclude conception, homosexuality foremost. No chemical contraception. No physical barriers to conception. No abortions, not even in cases of rape, incest.

What happens to mother and child after birth is irrelevant to the men who run right-wing political and religious institutions.

Pro-natalism is the sexual theory of “tea party” ignorati, myriad fundie sects, mormons, and the rc-church.

Pro-birth, a public health disaster, is pro-mass-death. It creates disease, poverty, and ignorance worldwide by fostering overpopulation, damning safe (and joyous) non-reproductive sex, forbidding responsible sex education, and blocking medical research.

His second comment was in response to “Planned Abortionhood”:

• The real issue — social control

Fundie xian males, like their fundie muslim and jewish brothers, shudder at a technological world in which mental agility has replaced physical strength as the core measure of economic utility.

This reordering of values strips away a ancient core faith-based lie: god-ordained male supremacy.

Unresolved to this day is a decades long struggle over gender equality — equal productive and reproductive rights.

Whom does The House and Senate back? The relevant group, women themselves, tens of millions of them?

Or white male second-hand-god salesmen? Spewing pro-birth at any price. One hundred year old social darwinism tarted up as “family values”.

Fundies are obvious offenders, but RCs run a close second.

Women’s aspirations, self realization, reproductive self-determination must be crushed by direct force.

Xian domestic terrorism, like muslim domestic terrorism, humiliates, intimidates, and batters women back to submission.

Protected by complicit federal and state officials, cells of xian thugs have been targeting women and their humane values for decades.

Fundie irrationality drives scientific knowledge about sex from America’s schools just as it drives medical research abroad.

Xian political ideologues must eventually embrace state totalitarianism. Their “truths” can never win popular support. An open society will repudiate their nihilism composed of literalist lies, morally repugnant beliefs, and puritanical rules.

The president the fundies hate so much has done what they’ve wanted for the last ten years: Kill Osama bin Laden.

So how is a proper fundie supposed to react?

That’s right, by blaming Obama for “murdering babies”!

One of the most extreme fundies I’ve encountered in five years of doing this blog is disbarred-Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt. I discovered him only two months ago, when I came across his get-rich-quick scheme.

I subscribed to his emails, and they’ve been doozies. Every other fundie talks about how bad this or that thing is and, by the way, could you throw a couple of dollars my way. Klingenschmitt talks about whatever he’s offended by, then requests that you pay him gobs of money to fax Congress. He makes sure you understand just how important it is that you (pay him lots of money to) fax Congress right now, if you want your voice to be heard! Emails and letters and phone calls aren’t nearly as effective as (paying him tons of money to) fax Congress right now!

This morning I received a typical email from Chaplain Money Grubber. I couldn’t find a copy on his website, so it looks like you won’t be able to follow along at home. I’m sure if you paid him, he’d be happy to fax you a copy right now!

He writes:

Obama kills Osama, but will he stop killing unborn American children?

We all grieved when 2,966 innocent civilians were killed on 9/11/2001.  But who grieved yesterday when 3,821 innocent unborn Americans were killed in abortion clinics across America?  Or the day before that?  Since 1973, more children are killed every day by abortion than were killed on 9/11, now totaling 53,000,000 deaths over 38 years.
…
I am proud of our military today.

But I am not proud of our President.  Mr. Obama claims credit for “justice” provided by the sacrifice of our military heroes, who killed the murderer Osama Bin Ladin.  But when will Obama provide equal “justice” for the 3,821 children murdered every day by abortion?   When will he budget $700 Billion dollars (equal to the Pentagon) to fight domestic terrorism that slaughters Americans in the womb?  Instead Obama funds domestic terrorism, paying the baby’s executioners with our tax dollars, to repeat 9/11 every day in abortion clinics across America.  Let Mr. Obama’s real war on “terror” begin in his tax policies. Sorry, Mr. President, you don’t get credit for winning one war, until you stop funding the other.

No. There is no “war on babies”, but there is a war on women’s civil rights. Let’s stop that war instead.

(I know what I wrote yesterday about scaling back the blog, which I am doing, but this is a quickie.)

Over the last few months, I’ve received a barrage of fundie emails about Planned Parenthood. The puppetmasters were trying to get all of their followers to barrage Congress with demands to stop all federal funding of Planned Parenthood. The House Republicans proudly showed us all how much power the Jihadist branch of Christianity still has over the GOP by voting last week to defund Planned Parenthood. Fortunately, there was enough rationality (and Democrats) in the Senate, and the attempt failed for now.

Many of the emails I received have been overly dramatic:

Planned Parenthood takes trillions of your tax dollars every year to murder billions of babies!

OK, maybe not quite that hyperbolic, but that’s really not too much of an exaggeration.

P-1000 Pregnancy Terminator

The fundies like to portray Planned Parenthood as a ravenous abortion machine, whose sole purpose is to wander loose among the general population, scanning all women it encounters. Any woman found to be pregnant is immediately be subjected to a forced liquid-metal abortion. And all of this is just to make the Planned Parenthood abortion doctors filthy, stinking rich.

I wrote an article three years ago about the true economics of abortion and what Planned Parenthood really does with the money. Today I found an article in the Washington Post titled “Five Myths about Planned Parenthood”. Here they are:

1. Planned Parenthood’s federal funding frees up other money to pay for abortions
2. Ninety percent of what Planned Parenthood does is provide abortions
3. Defunding Planned Parenthood will reduce abortions
4. Planned Parenthood serves only teenagers and prostitutes
5. People don’t really need Planned Parenthood

You should go read the article for the details.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
—Yogi Berra

So can you take a fork and not take it? (Maybe only if it’s a spork!)

You may have noticed that I haven’t written much in this blog in the last couple of months.

I’ve had a sleep disorder for quite a while. It has actually benefitted this blog, because if I’m awake anyway, I might as well do something constructive.

Some time back in January, things got busy at work for a bit. That aggravated the sleep disorder. Things got difficult. I’m now following a treatment plan, so hopefully things will get better.

Then there’s photography. I’ve dabbled in it over the years, with much unsuccess. Lately, it has become my main interest. One of these days, I’ll actually take a couple of good photographs.

So given my messed up life, I need to reconsider my priorities. In the near term, that would be work, brainy girlfriend, and photography.

So what happens to this blog?

The last thing I want to do is shut it down. It’s too important to me. It allows me to vent my frustrations when I see the country being destroyed by the blind, the delusional, and even the merely misguided.

I’ve also attracted an exceptional readership. This is probably a 4th-tier atheist blog. I don’t have nearly as many readers or anywhere near the mindshare of most other established blogs. That’s OK with me. A large readership just causes problems, because it attracts too many wackos of all stripes.

What we have here that I value a lot is a small community of active commenters. Scroll back through the last bunch of articles and see how many comments each article has. I consistently get more high-quality comments on my articles than some of the bigger blogs.

Shutting it down is too unpleasant to contemplate, but I can’t maintain the pace of the past. I have to scale things back, at least for the time being. For the most part, I will be ignoring the day-to-day fundie screeds that fill my email box (If I can. Those things really get me riled sometimes.).

Instead, I’m going to try to focus on bigger-scale projects. I have a bunch of fundie books I want to humiliate. One is a Bible comic book that Jeff alerted me to. Another is a book from the ’60s telling women how to be good wives. I have a pile of others stashed in a pile somewhere that I want to make fun of.

So look for several articles a month for the foreseeable future. Hopefully I’ll even be able to do one per week. I hope you’ll continue to come by and check things out. Maybe eventually things will return to how they were. But for now, my life needs this reordering of priorities.

I haven’t posted anything in three weeks. Things are a chaotic blur right now. I have a second sleep study coming up in a week. I’ll post again when I get this under control.

Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,—
…
Still it cried ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house:
‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more.’

—MacBeth, Act 2, Scene 2

Look at that thing. Kinda purty, ain’t it?

But what is it? To me, it looks like fireworks. Somebody set up a bunch of cones and set them off all at once.

Let’s back up a bit and see if we can get a better view.

Well now it looks more like fiber optics. Hundreds of fiber optic cables, connecting each city to many others.

Let’s back up all the way and see the entire width.

OOOOO!! It’s really getting morbidly pretty now! Click on that image to get a bigger view of its awesomeness. What it looks like to me is an all-out, free-for-all nuclear armageddon. Sixty-six city-states, each armed to the teeth, launching all their nukes simultaneously in one last-ditch effort to wipe out all of the infidels in the other cities. Kind of appropriate, as you’ll see in a moment.

This “dome of doom”, as I call it, is from a poster. That poster has some text below the dome. Let’s look at just a bit of it.

I know what that’s a list of! Contradictions in the Bible! So that “dome” is actually a diagram connecting all of the contradicting passages in the Bible.

There sure are a lot of them. Here’s the entire poster, shrunk way down to fit my margins:

This poster is produced by Project Reason, and you can get yourself a full-sized version of it right here. If you have access to a giant printer, you can print it out. Then do a Martin Luther and nail it to the door of your local fundigelical church.

I received an email from a fundie crying that some commie-liberal puppy-raping Jesus-hating atheist doesn’t like the national motto (“In God we trust”). He wants me to sign a petition to Congress to get them to vote yes on some unconstitutional legislation to waste tax dollars promoting his religion.

I get emails like this all the time. Some fundie pressure group wants their agenda passed, so they set up a website to make it easy to sign your name. They promise to then fax (Speaking of which, does anybody still use fax machines anymore? Which century do these fundies live in, anyway?) your message to Congress.

Usually at the bottom of that page somewhere there is a request for a donation to allow the fundie running the site to continue to sit on his fat ass all day sipping Long Island ice teas out by the pool or banging the Guatemalan cleaning lady in the laundry room while his wife is out shuttling the kids to soccer practice in the Chevy Suburban, even though you work two jobs (as a greeter at Wal-Mart and as a Guatemalan cleaning lady) and can barely make ends meet and absolutely can’t afford to make a donation but you do so anyway because you know if you don’t that Barrack Hussein Obama will take your guns “do this important work”.

I went to the site to look at their message. This is what I saw:

Holy crap! What a great racket! You have to pay them a minimum of $18, or they won’t even take your signature! For that amount, they’ll fax your message to “all 47 Republican Senators”. That’s actually quite cheap. I didn’t know you could buy Republican senators for only 38 cents each. Haliburton overpaid!

Or… or!… you can “Fax all 53 Democrat/Independent Senators for just $19”. (But these are low-grade politicians (“Democrats”), which explains why they’re only 36 cents each. Hey, you get what you pay for!)

But wait! There’s more! You can buy the entire Senate for one low payment of just $29! They make sure to point out to you that this is their “BEST VALUE”! (and it’s not some crappy lower-case “best value”. No! This is the primo, French Freedom Roast, upper-case “BEST VALUE”!)

But if you order today, you can instead get all House Democrats for just $55! (This is a limited-time offer. Supplies are limited. Very limited. And perishable. A whole bunch of them expired last November.)

Or choose all House Republicans for only $59! (And your health coverage, but you never really had that to begin with, so there’s no real cost to you. And Medicare; it will also cost you your Medicare. And Social Security. And civil rights. But you had no use for those things anyway.)

If you order in the next ten minutes (and pay double) we’ll double your order. You’ll get the entire House of Representatives for just $99!

But in this special internet offer, we’re going to give you the entire legislative and executive branches of government! That’s all 47 Republican senators! All 53 Democratic & independent senators! All 193 Democratic & independent congressman! Every one of the 242 Republican congressmen! Plus, we’ll throw in one imported president for free!

Some people pay $18. Some people pay $19. Others pay $29. But you won’t pay $55, You won’t pay $59. No, you won’t even pay $99. You can send 536 messages using 19th-century technology for the one low price of $119! Order today, and you’ll pay us an extra $40 just because! That’s right! You can pay our already-inflated price of $119, or you can pay the even-higher price of $159 for no added benefit!

Thanks to Jeff, who tipped me off to this story that those bastards at MSNBC and the New York Times refuse to cover:

FORMER DAVENPORT, IA—Immediately following the performance of a same-sex marriage ceremony Sunday afternoon at Holy Christ Almighty Lutheran Church on Lincoln Avenue, the city of Davenport, IA and all 99,685 of its residents were reportedly smitten into oblivion by the merciless wrath of God and flung into the deepest bowels of eternal hell.
…
“They tried to warn us and we didn’t listen—Lord, why did we not listen?” said Rev. Kenneth Hanson, the clergyman who performed the unholy marriage, moments before being dragged into a bottomless pit, flayed alive, and devoured by Satan, the Great Deceiver. “All I wanted to do was provide basic civil rights and legal recognition to Brian and Greg, two people who love each other and have been together for 15 years. But I was wrong. Oh, so wrong!”

On a related note, I’ve been so busy with work that I haven’t been able to get my head above water (Ouch! Sorry!) long enough to find out how many fundies are blaming Japan’s earthquake and tsunami on their being a mostly-Shinto country, or having a gay person, or eating shellfish, or giving us Pokemon, or something. You can mention that in the comments, if you know of any.