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Atheist Church: An Exercise in Mimicry

17 Apr
article-1305505-0024D6BB00000258-989_468x309

“And another thing: stop throwing your coats over the seat next to you. Leave room for latecomers. Yes, I’m talking to you, Leonard. What? Well, throw it over your lap, what do I care what you do with it? I should what? I will punch you in the pancreas you talk to me like that again! And turn your damn cellphones off! What? In the event of an emergency I will make an announcement and everyone can file out of the auditorium in an orderly fashion. How is that fascistic? So sit there like an idiot with the flames lapping at your heels, see if I care! No you can’t leave it on vibrate—BUT HOW DIFFICULT IS THIS? Do you want to come up here and do this? You think I like trying to encourage you miserable herd of passive-aggressive losers? I hate every last one of you! Die! Die! Die!”

I knew this was happening in the U.K., atheists getting together on Sunday mornings to mimic a church gathering of like-minded nonbelievers. Now we have an example in Houston, Texas, of all places.

But the 80 or so attendees at this new weekly gathering for nonbelievers come for many of the same reasons that others pack churches in this heavily Christian corner of the Bible Belt — a sense of community and an uplifting message that will help them tackle the challenges of the coming week, and, maybe, the rest of their lives.

“Just because you don’t believe in God does not mean you do not need to get together in community and draw strength from that,” said Mike Aus, a onetime Lutheran pastor who is now an atheist and founder of Houston Oasis.

“We are open to any message about life as long as no dogmatic claims are made.”

Like the inviolability of the innocents?

Oy.

Among the values preached (if that’s not too dogmatic a word): “Everyone should be accepted wherever they are as long as they are accepting in turn.”  In other words, Thou shalt hate thy enemies.

“Homo sapiens is a tribal species; we thrive in community,” he said. “There are elements of church life that serve human needs but transcend church life, like the need to gather, the need to be together. We can offer those in a secular way.”

That offer is getting a healthy number of takers — attendance averages 70 people, but has hit 100. Twice during a recent gathering, volunteers had to bring in additional chairs to accommodate latecomers, and some attendees reported driving over an hour to get there.

It’s a diverse crowd, ranging from high school to retirement age and including a number of African-Americans, Latinos and Asians. They came in casual attire, in tune with the jeans and black turtleneck Aus was wearing.

Houston Oasis is part of a growing trend. Atheists and other nonbelievers have long gathered for events with meaning and music, but in the last year, a number of nontheistic groups have initiated Sunday morning events that include elements of a standard church service. The largest is London’s Sunday Assembly, which meets in a former church and has been turning away people due to lack of space since its launch in January.

A nega-church in the making.

I was curious about what actually went on during one of these events. Through means I would rather not disclose, I did manage to get hold of the order of service, as well as the notes from one of the Sunday morning “Announcements”:

Coffee hour has been cancelled. Apparently there was a dispute about whether the coffee was fair trade or merely organic and so it was all flushed down the toilet. The Habitat for Humanity project has been cancelled, as no one bothered to volunteer. It seems everyone expect government to take care of stuff like that. The Orangutans Are People Too seminar has been cancelled, as “Snippy” was “put down” after ripping Mrs. Winstead to pieces. The anti-anti-abortion protest has been cancelled. Seems the clinic in question has been temporarily shut down until the plumber’s strike is settled. The Robert Ingersoll Study Group has been cancelled. Certain members objected to his having been a Republican and a man. The Transhumanist Winter Solstice Gift Exchange has been cancelled because of confusion regarding genderless regifting. The wedding affirmation of Bob and Lindsey and Aaron and Leslie has been cancelled because the gift registry went on for 32 pages.The Anti-Malaria Fundraiser has been cancelled because, frankly, there are too many people as it is and evolution has reasons that Reason does not know.

Among some of the more popular hymns: A Mighty Fortress Is My Duplex, Amazing Nothing, When I Survey the Wondrous Key Ratings Demographic, and the Winter Solstice classic Silent Scream.

The readings from this particular service were taken from the transcripts of Lenny Bruce’s profanity trial, season 2 of the The L Word, and the Marquis de Sade’s unfinished novel Cramp.

The Benediction was short and sweet: “Good luck.”

I will be curious to see what kind of shelf life this movement has. Eventually there will be splits and factions, even heresy trials for those who don’t not believe enough, closet agnostics, old-fashioned humanists who still believe in such a thing as human exceptionalism, etc. Some may apostasize and become full-throated believers, no doubt resulting in ostracization and disfellowship.

It will be nothing if not fun.

UPDATE (04/19/13): Interesting post on former ELCA Lutheran pastor Mike Aus.

 
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Posted by on April 17, 2013 in Less Than Divine Communications, This Is Why I Never Leave My Apartment, What Are You Doing with That Minkee?, You've Got to Be Freaking Kidding Me

 

Yale to Promote Animal Personhood. Peter Singer Invited as Exhibit A.

17 Apr
Yes, but is he pro-choice?

Yes, but is he pro-choice?

You don’t know whether to laugh or throw up in your Grape Nuts. I have no doubt that Germany in the 1930s would have been quite supportive of this legislation, given the animal lovers and vegetarians high up in party ranks.

Yale University is organizing a conference on “Personhood Beyond the Human” for December 6-8, 2013. It will feature, among other proponents of personhood rights for animals, notorious infanticide and bestiality-promoting ethicist Peter Singer.

The conference is co-sponsored by the animal rights group Nonhuman Rights Project and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, in collaboration with the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and the Yale Animal Ethics Group.

Peter Singer, who has been labeled Australia’s “most notorious messenger of death” by the Catholic archbishop of his hometown of Melbourne, has served as Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University since 1999.

He has also openly promoted bestiality and experimentation on the mentally disabled.

Of course he has. Singer knows his audience.

Keep in mind: Singer is a bioethicist. Princeton actually cuts him a no-doubt quite substantial check. To opine on ethics. What next? Libya on the UN Human Rights Council?

I would like to draft a movement to have Peter Singer reclassified from the species homo sapiens to one I just invented — ecce mentalcasus, whose members proliferate in the 1-95 Northeast Corridor, parts of the Northwest, and the programming department of Showtime.

Cowl tip to @esgetology

 
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Posted by on April 17, 2013 in Higherer Edukation, SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP, This Is So Not Good, This Is Why I Never Leave My Apartment

 

Maine Democrat Candidate Level 85 ‘World of Warcraft’ Orc. Yes, Just Like Adlai Stevenson.

06 Oct

“I’m Colleen Lachowicz, and I approved this message.”

I don’t see why playing online games should disqualify someone from high office. Sure she dresses her virtual self up in scary gear out of LOTR and revels in killing with impunity. So did Julius II. Should he not have been pope?

Colleen Lachowicz is a Democratic candidate running for State Senate in Maine. She’s also a level 85 orc in the massively popular online game “World of Warcraft.” And for that, the Republican party says she is unfit for office.

Maine’s GOP has accused Lachowicz of living a “bizarre double life” and set up a website meant to out her participation in the popular online game — a game that currently boasts some 10 million players around the world.

Not only does the website show off a picture of the orc character she plays – named Santiaga — it also displays comments that have been dug up from online forums in which Lachowicz talks about her love of the (sometimes violent) game as well as her thoughts on various political topics.

Among the comments the website attributes to her:

“So I’m a level 68 orc rogue girl. I stab things . . . a lot. Who would have thought that a peace-lovin’, social worker and democrat would enjoy that?!”

“I can kill stuff without going to jail. There are some days when this is more necessary than others.”

“I’m so jealous! I wish I wasn’t at work. I’d much rather be gaming with my guildies!”

Lachowicz also appears to refer to members of the Tea Party as, well, teabaggers.

OK, she sounds like a moron. But think about it: Do you really want your elected officials focused 24/7 on how they can “help” you? Don’t you want them to have all-consuming “hobbies” that deflect their attention away from their legislative duties? Wouldn’t the world have been a better place if Hitler and Stalin had consumed their time playing Grand Theft Auto?

The only truly disturbing thing here is that the news stories describe her as a level 85 orc, while she apparently described herself as a level 68. Is the MSM, once again, trying to inflate a Democrat’s status and so enhance her chances of victory come Election Day? (Please note: I don’t know from orcs and levels. I have a real life.)

Should Ms. Lachowicz be elected, let’s hope she continues to enjoy a rich fantasy life, in the privacy of her home, for longer and longer periods of time. Which is to say, not in the state senate.

 
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Posted by on October 6, 2012 in I Don't Know Phases, Is My Complaining Interfering with Your Crying?, That Looks Nothing Like Me, This Is Why I Never Leave My Apartment, Those Meds Will Not Take Themselves ...

 

Now the *Director* of ‘Innocence of Muslims’ Says He’s Innocent, Thought He Was Replacing Tony Scott on ‘Top Gun II’

15 Sep

“I swear they told me I was playing Gandalf…”

Wow. Either that “Sam Bacile,” aka Nakoula Nakoula (Oh, come on! What is with these names?), is the cleverest dude on the planet, or the cast and crew of The Innocence of Muslims, a stupid exercise in interfaith pranking that has been used as the pretext for the Middle East meltdown, are among the dimmest of dimwits ever to be let loose without adult supervision.

It turns out that the director of this masterwork is a guy named Alan Roberts, whose career has been mostly in soft porn for the lovelorn.

Roberts’ real name is Robert Brownell, a 65-year-old small-time director and editor, whose directing credits include some softcore porn from the 70s and 80s like 1977′s “Young Lady Chatterly,” “The Sexpert” and “The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood,” third of the Happy Hooker trilogy. Other credits reportedly include low-budget films like 1991′s “Karate Cop” along with 28 editing credits.

“My gut tells me he (Roberts) was just a has-been director who was trying to prove he could still be Hollywood,” an actress who worked on Innocence of Muslims reportedly wrote in an email.

Wait—there was a Happy Hooker trilogy? As in more than one?

Gawker wrote that it has tried to reach Roberts, “but his business associate told us he ‘turned off his phone’ soon after protests broke out over the film and is laying low. But he said Roberts was ‘non-political’ and did not have any apparent anti-Islam feelings.”

According to the report, “Roberts may have been duped by the film’s producer in much the same way as the rest of the cast and crew. They believed they were participating in a period piece about ancient Egypt and had no idea the movie would be edited and dubbed into a piece of Islamophobic propaganda.”

A period piece about ancient Egypt—for NatGeo? The Discovery Channel? Al Jazeera? The Playboy Channel?

The promoter of the film, Steve Klein, seems to have been one of the two people who actually knew what they were doing, and why:

The public face for the anti-Muslim film inflaming the Middle East is not the filmmaker, but an insurance agent and Vietnam War veteran whose unabashed and outspoken hatred of radical Muslims has drawn the attention of civil libertarians, who say he’s a hate monger.

With the Coptic Christian filmmaker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in hiding, film promoter Steve Klein has taken center stage in the unfolding international drama. He’s given a stream of interviews about the film and the man he says he knew only as Sam Bacile, and is using the attention to talk about his own political views. …

The role dovetailed with Klein’s relentless pursuit of radical Muslims in America, an activity he says he began after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It took on more meaning in 2007, when his son, then a 27-year-old Army staff sergeant, was seriously injured in Iraq. Matthew Klein, a medic, was awarded the Bronze Star for Valor and a Purple Heart for injuries he suffered in the attack by a suicide bomber, according to the Army Human Resources Command.

“What do I get out of this? I get to die one of these days hoping my granddaughters and my grandsons will be safe from these monsters,” Klein said while sipping a beer on the front porch of his home.

He claimed to have visited “every mosque in California” and identified “500 to 750 of these people who are future suicide bombers and murderers.”

Well, if Steve Klein says it’s a fact, who am I to contradict him?

Of course, everyone else involved in this enterprise is twisting themselves into great gobs of baklava to declare their love of Islam, and how they are not in the least Islamophobic. Why, if they had their druthers, they’d go make their soft-porn livings in Yemen or Libya—but they have delicate skin, you see, and the sun is just so brutal on their complexions, and you see all this stuff on the Web about melanoma…

Look, other than watching the trailer on the Interweb, I haven’t seen Innocence of Muslims, which I have no doubt is a bombastic piece of propaganda and by no means a serious pursuit of “the historical Muhammad.” And I’m also certain that civil libertarians and guardians of free speech will approach this matter with the same constitutional integrity as they did the controversies swirling around The Last Temptation of Christ and Corpus Christi.

There’s that darn sarcasm again…

 
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Posted by on September 15, 2012 in "Entertainment", Please Stop Killing Everyone, This Is So Not Good, This Is Why I Never Leave My Apartment

 

Bank Fires Man for Stealing 10 Cents 50 Years Ago, Tells Him to Think Bigger

02 Sep

So under sterner rules concocted by the FDIC to prevent CEOs and other executives at the nation’s largest banks from committing economy-crippling crimes, a customer-service rep at Wells Fargo, who was making less than $30K per annum, was fired for putting a cardboard dime into a laundromat washing machine—in 1963. He was a teenager at the time.

Richard Eggers doesn’t look like a mastermind of financial crime.

The former farm boy speaks deliberately, can’t remember the last time he got a speeding ticket, and favors suspenders, horn-rimmed glasses and plaid shirts. But the 68-year-old Vietnam veteran is still too risky for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, which fired him on July 12 from his $29,795-a-year job as a customer service representative.

Egger’s crime? Putting a cardboard cutout of a dime in a washing machine in Carlisle on Feb. 2, 1963.

“It was a stupid stunt and I’m not real proud of it, but to fire somebody for something like this after seven good years of employment is a dirty trick when you come right down to it,” said Eggers of Des Moines. “And they’re doing this kind of thing all across the country.”

Big banks have been firing low-level employees like Eggers since the issuance of new federal banking employment guidelines in May 2011 and new mortgage employment guidelines in February.

The tougher standards are meant to weed out executives and mid-level bank employees guilty of transactional crimes, like identity fraud or mortgage fraud, but they are being applied across-the-board thanks to $1-million-a day fines for noncompliance.

Now, is this a case of the federal government’s writing regulations intended to impress the ignorant that it’s patrolling our financial institutions day and night looking for malfeasance, when in fact it has wink-winked at banks by providing incentives to punish the powerless in aid of a farcical “no-tolerance” policy while the big fish are enabled to cut deals and go scot-free?

Critics point out that big banks have insulated top executives from criminal accountability by signing multimillion federal settlements in which they admit no wrongdoing.

On the same day that Eggers was fired, Wells Fargo & Co., the largest U.S. bank by market capitalization, paid $175 million to the U.S. Justice Department to settle allegations it had targeted black and Hispanic homeowners for sub-prime loans.

Na-a-a-a-a-a-h.

 
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Posted by on September 2, 2012 in It's Not Personal Only Business, Listen to Admiral Akbar Damn You!, This Is Why I Never Leave My Apartment, Well That's Depressing

 

Thai Buddhists Say Steve Jobs Has Been Reincarnated, Probably as Windows 8

01 Sep

Karma’s a bitch.

So when Steve Jobs died from pancreatic cancer last year, one of his software engineers, Tony Tseung, emailed a Thai Buddhist group to find out what his former boss could expect on the other side. Now we know:

Mr. Jobs has been reincarnated as a celestial warrior-philosopher, the Dhammakaya group said in a special television broadcast, and he’s living in a mystical glass palace hovering above his old office at Apple’s Cupertino, California headquarters.

Mr. Jobs’s death unleashed a wave of grief across the world when he died last October. From Shanghai to Sydney to New York, admirers of his iconic devices laid flowers and lit candles to mourn his passing. Some commentators described the outpouring as an homage to a kind of secular prophet whose innovations changed the ways millions of people live their lives, strengthening the appeal of a brand which already was approaching cult-like status.

Some of Mr. Jobs’s admirers in Malaysia later gathered on a tropical island and in a religious ceremony each took a bite from an apple before flinging the fruit into the sea in a bid to speed up his reincarnation.

Now, Phra Chaibul Dhammajayo, abbot at the Dhammakaya Temple here just north of Bangkok, claims Mr. Jobs has already been reborn.

“After Steve Jobs passed away, he was reincarnated as a divine being with a special knowledge and appreciation for science and the arts,” the Dhammakaya leader said in the first of a series of sermons beamed to hundreds of thousands of the group’s followers around the world.

Phra Chaibul’s claims are impossible to corroborate, and his sermons have unleashed significant criticism, including from some skeptics who suspect he is just trying to get attention to help with fundraising. Among other things, he has said the reincarnated Mr. Jobs spends much of his time lounging in a glass palace resembling an Apple store. Phra Chaibul also has said the being formerly known as Steve Jobs is attended by 20 servants, who seem to resemble the Apple store ‘Geniuses’ who help customers set up their iPhones and other devices here on earth.

I don’t know if that’s the Christian equivalent of heaven or hell, but I know I do not want to find out. While “celestial warrior-philosopher” probably ain’t a bad gig for all eternity, and undoubtedly comes with a 403(b) and dental, if I had to literally hang with “Chet” and “Larry” from an Apple Genius bar forever and ever, I’d kill myself.

I’m not trying to make fun of anybody else’s religion here. A lotta lotta people around the globe believe in reincarnation. (A lotta lotta people around the globe also believe crickets make nice snacks, but that’s another story.) Nevertheless, I think the criticism of this “pronouncement” is apt:

But by adopting Mr. Jobs to help spread its theology, the Dhammakaya group has certainly raised eyebrows, including upsetting some Buddhists.

Other Buddhist leaders disapprove of Phra Chaibul’s sermons, which are titled “Where Is Steve Jobs?” They say they are a stunt designed to lure more followers to Dhammakaya’s vast sanctuary. “Even if it is true, it is just showing off and has nothing to do with Lord Buddha’s teachings,” said one prominent religious authority, Phra Payom Kallayano.

Another revered scholar and temple abbot, Phra Paisal Visalo, told local media here that he is worried that many more people will follow Mr. Tseung, the software engineer at Apple in California, by seeking Dhammakaya’s help in contacting deceased friends and relatives.

After all, there’s an app for that.

Let the dead bury the dead. Or not. I just wish someone would please tell me why I can’t get a different theme for Safari. That aluminum motif is beginning to make me sad …

 
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Posted by on September 1, 2012 in A Blood-Curdling Maniacal Laugh Is My Spiritual Gift, This Is Why I Never Leave My Apartment, We'll Meet Again

 

Women Dropping Out of Atheism Fest Due to Sexual Harrassment and Air Supply Tribute Band

15 Jul

Christian Century posted this RNS piece on atheism’s sexual harrassment problem:

Officials for The Amazing Meeting, or TAM, said Wednesday (July 11) that women would make up 31 percent of the 1,200 conference attendees, down from 40 percent the year before. A month before the conference, pre-registration was only 18 percent women, organizers said.

The explanations are many — the bad economy, that women, as caregivers, are less able to get away, and that more men than women identify as skeptics, whose worldview rejects the supernatural and focuses on science and rationality.

But in the weeks preceding TAM, another possible explanation has roiled the nontheist community. Online forums have crackled with charges of sexism in TAM’s leadership and calls for the ouster of D.J. Grothe, the male president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, TAM’s organizer. In June, Rebecca Watson, a skeptic blogger and speaker, canceled her TAM appearance because, she said on her blog, she does “not feel welcome or safe.”

Other nontheists — both male and female — have shared stories of unwanted sexual attention at nontheist gatherings, including propositions for sex and unwelcome touching. Chatter has ranged from calls for more women to attend nontheist events to personal attacks on prominent female skeptics for discussing harassment. Meanwhile, two more skeptic/feminist bloggers announced they will not attend TAM.

Frankly, I’m skeptical. In fact, I don’t believe it. (See what I did there? Because they’re a bunch of skeptics and nonbelievers. It’s like a joke.)

Last year, at another skeptic conference, [TAM organizer Rebecca] Watson said she was approached late at night in an elevator by a man she believed was seeking sex. When she blogged about it, the “atheosphere” erupted in comments, both supportive and negative. British biologist Richard Dawkins, the best-selling author of “The God Delusion,” wrote that Watson should “stop whining” and “grow a thicker skin.”

Given the glacial pace at which evolution proceeds, growing a thicker skin may take a while. (Because Dawkins in a big-time evolution evangelist, so I’m playing off … oh, never mind…)

 
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Posted by on July 15, 2012 in But They Said They Were My Friends, I Hate When That Happens, This Is Why I Never Leave My Apartment

 
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