Archival Antonin


"...this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority..."

Antonin Scalia, the author of the remarks quoted below (from an article in the religio-conservative journal First Things, and drawn from remarks he made at a conference sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life at the University of Chicago Divinity School) is being touted by some as the next Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

I leave it to you to figure out from the following why I think his appointment to that post would be an unmitigated disaster for American jurisprudence.

In my view, the major impetus behind modern aversion to the death penalty is the equation of private morality with governmental morality. This is a predictable (though I believe erroneous and regrettable) reaction to modern, democratic self-government. ...

Few doubted the morality of the death penalty in the age that believed in the divine right of kings. ... It is easy to see the hand of the Almighty behind rulers whose forebears, in the dim mists of history, were supposedly anointed by God, or who at least obtained their thrones in awful and unpredictable battles whose outcome was determined by the Lord of Hosts, that is, the Lord of Armies. It is much more difficult to see the hand of God -- or any higher moral authority -- behind the fools and rogues (as the losers would have it) whom we ourselves elect to do our own will. ...

Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe, and has least support in the church-going United States. I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. ...

The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible.

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Nine Billion Archives: Chazztown Follies



March 30, 2004

How Long, O Lord, How Long?

This kind of time-wasting government nonsense goes on in Chazz (my hometown) ALL. THE. TIME.

Invocation by atheist prompts walkout in Charleston [SC]

Some of the half-dozen or so Charleston City Council members who left Tuesday said their religious beliefs compelled them to leave.

But Herb Silverman, who noticed the walkout when he rose to speak, said it was rude.

"I think it's outrageous behavior," said Silverman, a College of Charleston math professor. "What would we say if the first time an African-American got up to speak at City Council, a bunch of whites walked out, or if a rabbi got up to give an invocation and a bunch of people got up to leave?"

But councilman Wendell Gilliard said the idea of an atheist giving the invocation was particularly wrong when war is going on in Iraq.

"We've got young men and young women over there fighting for our principles, based on God," he said. "I think it's about time we started standing up for something in this country."

"Fighting for our principles," the man says. And "It's about time we started standing up for something in this country." I couldn't agree more, Councilman G. But I suspect we are talking about standing up for entirely different principles.

Among the many, many reasons I will be glad when (or should I say "if"?) the war in Iraq ends is that it will no longer afford right-wing dick-wavers an immediate, emotional opportunity to identify American "principles" with their twisted, exclusionary, self-righteous, warmongering fundamentalism. Isn't it bad enough that this war is effectively demolishing our future ability to preserve and enforce the principles of international law? Isn't it bad enough that our supposedly Christian leadership has cynically attempted to make pre-emptive violence look like a moral imperative.

Do we also have to pretend that God wants us to do these things IN HIS NAME?

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Friday April 25, 2003

Congressman Gilliard is at it Again..... 

Today's Charleston, SC Post and Courier ("The South's Oldest Daily Right Wing Rag Newspaper") headlines (see above) Councilman Wendell Gilliard having the vapors over the immoral horror of college girls sunbathing in Marion Square, the central downtown park.

No, I'm not kidding. Mr. Gilliard is upset because the arrant hussies are wearing -- gasp -- bikinis! Two-piece bathing suits are a tooooool of the devil, you know.

It's Charleston's own version of "shock and awe:" scantily clad sunbathers soaking up the rays in Marion Square.

writes P&C staffer Jason Hardin. (One hopes his tongue is buried deeply in his dimpled cheek.)

One city councilman says the display is inappropriate in a place frequented by families and surrounded by churches. Councilman Wendell Gilliard says he is ready to take a stand, comparing the activity to the hot-selling "Girls Gone Wild" videos of college students in various stages of drunken undress.

Methinks the councilman is terribly agitated about some videos that, surely, he's only HEARD about. Such an upright man (you should excuse the expression) would never have actually watched such a thing, or even polluted his pristine mind with the thought of other people buying it and watching it and getting turned on and playing it over and over and over again, right?

"I've seen them pushing the limit. They have their breasts exposed, their ... rear end exposed, wearing a G-string bikini," he said.

And I just couldn't look away!

"This 'Girls Gone Wild'-type attitude has caught ahold all across the country. We don't want it to get to that point, but I'm sad to say I think it's at that point now."

Gilliard, who has led the city's effort to shut down a West Ashley adult video store, said he was disturbed by the sight of several sunbathers during a recent gospel music concert in the park.

He added that [the sunbathers] have caused other problems, including a recent traffic jam.

"Everybody thought something had happened, but these two guys in a truck were looking at the girls laying out on the lawn," he said.

Oh dear. Now this is a problem. Irresponsible boys are rubbernecking and holding up traffic. We can't have that. It Must Be Stopped. (While you're at it, arrest those lame-ass tourists who don't know their way around town. Why, only last week I was stuck behind a fellow who dithered for 12 whole seconds when he discovered he couldn't turn right onto a one-way street!)

The Rev. Carl Wiggins, pastor of the Chapel of the Holy Spirit in Ladson, said he wouldn't mind seeing a sunbather-free Marion Square.

"I'm here praying, and it's hard on a human being not to be distracted," he said.

Let me get this straight, Rev. You want the police to restrain these naughty college girls because you want to pray in the park and you don't want to be distracted from those prayers by intrusive visions of female loveliness. You can't avert your eyes because it's, ahem, TOO HARD.

Hello? Where does your own responsibility for avoiding temptation and restraining your own reactions come into this equation? Anywhere? Or should the world just be made safe for Christian fundamentalists so they aren't ever forced to exercise their spiritual strength? Hey, I've got an idea...let's put our women into BURKAS! Then men can pray in peace!

[Mayor Joe] Riley said he does not agree there is a problem.

"It's spring, and warm days after a cold, gray, dreary winter ... attract sunbathers," he said. "Frankly, I feel that it's a very positive thing that Marion Square, beautifully restored ... is attractive to our citizenry."

Police Maj. Herb Whetsell said officers would have a difficult time trying to enforce an ordinance against sunbathers, although public nudity is another thing entirely.

"If a person is standing out there peeing on the sidewalk, yeah, we'll lock them up," he said.

Figuring out what kind of swimsuit should be considered indecent would be difficult, he said.

Luckily for Councilman Gilliard's and the Reverend Wiggins's threatened moral security, this year's College of Charleston graduation is not far off.

4:00:38 PM     comments []

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The Nine Billion Archives of God, Part 3



Polka to Satori?

The NYT's Dick Teresi reviews Rational Mysticism: Dispatches From the Border Between Science and Spirituality, by John Horgan.

... Horgan, a former senior writer for Scientific American, sets out to find how trances, visions, satori and other mystical experiences work. The early civilizations that invented science also used religion as an intertwining path to the truth, and Horgan follows in this tradition. He is a seeker as well as a journalist, and his mission is personal as well as professional. It's "The Varieties of Religious Experience" meets "Siddhartha."

Oh dear. This does not sound entirely promising, does it? However:

The seers he encounters are as entertaining as they are maddening. He begins with a traditional religious scholar, the octogenarian Huston Smith, a propounder of the ''perennial philosophy,'' which holds that all the world's great religions express the same fundamental truths about the nature of reality, and that reality can be understood through a mystical experience.

Well, no actually, all the world's great religions do NOT express "the same fundamental truths about the nature of reality," nor do they all hold that "mystical experience" is necessary to understand reality. But never mind, if nothing else, there is definitely amusement to be had here:

We move on to the thriving field of transpersonal psychology, whose primary exponent, Ken Wilber, is so enlightened that he struck his sick wife because her breast cancer interrupted his spiritual growth. Wilber claims that his big satori happened in a German pub, while he was dancing the polka with a bunch of elderly men.

Did you have the same Bad Thought I did?

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March 27, 2003

Aggrandizing Illusions

An Arabic News article that quotes Syrian scientists claiming they have proved that "aggrandizing" (invoking the name of Allah) when slaughtering an animal will prevent bacterial growth in the meat. Apparently they have also proved (cough) that aggrandizement can cure epidemic diseases in livestock, such as "Mad cow, thrush fever and chicken plague."

He explained that the reason is because the cattle and the birds knew by their sensibility that mentioning Allah's name spread filled their spirit with ease and tranquility. As a result their organs and defense systems became active and disease causing factors are all eliminated.

Uh-huh.
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The Nine Billion Archives of God, Part 2



A Creed for the New Millenium?

Is Christianity finally finished? Can it possibly remain relevant in this new century, approximately 2007 years after its founder was born?

Not if its institutional forms keep behaving in ways that make the satire of Betty Bowers (motto: "Love the Sinner, Hate Their Clothes") and Landover Baptist ("Where the Worthwhile Worship") so screamingly spot-on.

Landover Baptist has been taken seriously by huge numbers of its readers, and it's not hard to see why. This excerpt from a Landover Baptist "sermon" by one of Landover's "23 paid pastors" is only that much over-the-top when compared to actual pulpit rhetoric in some fundamentalist churches:

Friends, people look at us and laugh. Did you know that? They actually find Fundamentalist Baptists humorous. They think we are old-fashioned, and that we make up stories about Hell to scare people.

It is very upsetting to have someone laugh in your face when you are trying to explain to them that if they don't return Christ's love and accept Him as their personal savior that they are going to be tortured and have all of the flesh burnt off their body every day for all of eternity in a literal lake of fire. So upsetting in fact, that when witnessing to an unsaved Lutheran the other day, I responded to his laughter by saying, "I can't wait to see you burn in Hell!"

He was taken aback, and quite shocked. I used this opportunity to witness even more. I said, "You won't be laughing when you see demons using your testicles as ping-pong balls." ... Then I explained to him that I would be the one laughing at him when he was burning in Hell. "I can't wait to see the look of surprise on your face as Jesus drop-kicks you off the cliff of glory into the lake of fire!" I exclaimed.

After leaving the conversation, it dawned on me that I was actually expressing the way I really felt. Even before Lutherans and all other unsaved trash wind up roasting in Hell, God has promised colorful violence and torture for them, come Judgment Day. God will use fire, plagues and beasts to kill them, and what did he say good Christians like us will do in the meantime? We "shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall send gifts to one another" (Revelation 11:10). Well, I don't think Jesus will mind me getting a head start on the celebration. Since I am filled with the Holy Spirit and Jesus lives inside of my left ventricle, I was actually expressing the way HE felt to that Hellbound Lutheran!

Praise God!

Landover Baptist's mailbag is a revealing cross-section of religious opinion. Christians and non-Christians alike are unanimous in their disapproval of the Landover Baptist belief system.

This is a good sign. Even serious (albeit slightly dim) Christians can see that there is something very wrong with a "church" that emphasizes punishment, legalism, literalism, exclusion, pride and its own earthly establishment. Would that real churches which have strayed in those directions could see themselves as we see Landover Baptist.

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March 25, 2003

Religion in an Electrode?

According to an article in the Telegraph (UK), the BBC science program Horizon will feature a unique experiment meant to test the theory that religious belief can be induced by stimulating the so-called "God Center" of the brain.

Dr Michael Persinger of Laurentian University, Canada, has devised a special helmet that uses electromagnetic fields to induce electrical changes in the brain's temporal lobes, which are linked with religious belief. ...

Prof [Richard] Dawkins, author of [the upcoming A Devil's Chaplain : Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (September 2003)], was the ideal candidate for the latest test of whether science can now explain away religion, given his famously virulent views on religion, attacking it as a "virus of the mind" and an "infantile regression".

Apparently Dr. Dawkins had some strange experiences and "tingles" while under Persinger's "neurotheological" helmet, but alas, he was not converted to a belief in God.

In my Bette Davis Voice:

What. A. Dick.

Famed homosexual hater Fred Phelps, who notoriously brought his "congregation" (composed largely of his own extended family) to Mathew Shepard's funeral waving a sign that read, "God Hates Fags," is continuing his crapola crusade in Jefferson County, Texas. He'll be picketing the courthouse in Beaumont because 279th District Court Judge Tom Mulvaney granted a decree of divorce to two men who were joined in civil union in Vermont.

Instead of being glad that the two gay men were no longer married, Phelps is pissed that the divorce in Texas essentially validates Vermont 's same-sex union laws. Never mind that federal law requires states to recognize each others' marriages.

Shades of Falwell and Robertson, Phelps and Co. believe that all of the United States' recent disasters: 9-11; the Washington, D.C., sniper slayings; the shuttle explosion and the Rhode Island nightclub fire, were acts of God's will because he wants to punish gays.

"We have a message," Phelps told The Beaumont Enterprise," ... And the message is, 'God hates America,' and, 'God is through with America,' and, 'It is a sin to pray for America.' And the primary culprit behind the preachers are these blind judges. Primary culprit. They have the last word, and they have to take most of the blame."

The Southern Poverty Law Center's spring 2001 "Intelligence Report" described Phelps's group as an intimidating nuisance: "They have used daily pickets, an array of intimidating tactics, scores of lawsuits and a veritable flood of faxes that are so filled with slurs and sex that they rival the product of the most prolific professional pornographer."

The virulent and almost pornographic nature of much of Phelps's output is particularly interesting in view of the fact that there is compelling evidence that the most vehement male homophobes are the most responsive to homoerotic material.

I suspect the "Reverend" Phelps is not only sick, but sick in a very specific way. It's called self-hatred. The (understandable) hostility directed toward him by the gay community is probably a kind of validation of the way he feels about himself. Maybe it's what he's subconsciously looking for -- fierce and definitive rejection from the men he'd really like to diddle. Then he's safe, see?

So maybe gays should picket him with signs that say, "You know you really love us, Closet Man!" and "Come have your way with me, Rev!" His head might explode.

3:51:54 PM     comments []

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The Nine Billion Archives of God, Part 1


Over the next couple of days I'm going to be archiving some old posts from the previous "Nine Billion" blog. Bear with me.

The four posts of Alice Auneville's humanist take on Genesis have been gathered together in the sidebar story Alice Reads the Bible.

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March 12, 2003

At least he's prettier than Alanis Morrisette

The next Jim Carrey movie, Bruce Almighty (May 23), will feature Carrying-On as a dissatisfied guy given the powers of God for a weekend.

Given a similar opportunity, I'd raise George Burns from the dead.

And while we're at it, let's get a show of hands: who thinks "God" will talk out of his ass?

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March 14, 2003

Polygamists in Arizona

According to the Phoenix New Times, the state of Arizona has been allowing a "feudal" colony of fundamentalist Mormons to force underage girls into illegal polygamous marriages for decades.

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March 23, 2003

No sex, please, we're religious

Robby Nichols, vice president of marketing for Covenant Communications, a publisher of books aimed at members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), notes that sex has absolutely no place in the relatively new publishing niche of LDS romance novels In fact, a couple's first kiss is likely to come only after they are engaged to be married. "There is no swearing, no graphic anything and we steer as far from innuendo as we can."

Anita Stansfield is the best-selling Mormon romance author, selling more than 600,000 books since her debut novel, First Love and Forever, in 1994. But she has noted that content standards are growing stricter these days. In a book published in 2000, Stansfield was forced to delete the one and only sentence describing a couple's wedding night: "He laughed and kicked the door closed."



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