Fred Phelps, Closeted Fag?

The Supreme Court has decided to review the case against "Pastor" Fred Phelps, the lunatic preacher responsible for the ugly, hateful, and completely un-Christlike protests at military funerals.  The $5 million verdict was overturned by an appeals court.

I must admit to being torn on this one.  As you can see from the picture above, these people are full of hate and anger and their signs and chants are offensive on every level except that of the lunatic right wing Xtian fringe.  Even so, these worthless pieces of shit are entitled to free speech of some kind.  But should that free speech include disrupting a private service?  Should someone be allowed to cause severe emotional damage to grieving relatives?  Difficult questions, obviously, or this wouldn't have made it to the Supreme Court.

One thing I am not torn about is that Fred Phelps is a horrible man who deserves a long and painful death.  He and the people that support him are a waste of carbon.  When they die no one will protest because the people they have actually harmed (as opposed to the invented harm of homosexuality against them) are better people than they.  And as is always true with these people, Fred Phelps is obviously a closeted fag (see picture below).  Self hate is the ugliest type of hate, especially when it is aimed at the rest of the world.

"You can't preach the Bible without preaching hatred."

"God doesn't hate them because they're fags; they're fags because God hates them."

This is crossposted from the MOPod blog.

The 'Devil' Writes Pat Robertson...

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher.

The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake.

Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.

You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
via NPR

The Milky Way

So when you look up at the night sky in a really dark place like in a desert the number of stars is simply overwhelming. Now with the aid of really good telescopes and digital technology, over 3,000 pictures of the entire night sky have been stitched together to display this incredible mosaic. Here* is a zoomable version that lets you see stars not visible to the human eye. Pick a dark spot and zoom in, for instance the lower right hand corner. Amazingly enough there are thousands of points of light, mostly red. Almost all of these are extremely distant Galaxies which are collections of billions of stars. Billions of stars in each galaxy. The bright band across the full picture is our view of the Milky Way from inside. Again, billions of stars.

So what kind of god makes a universe of this magnitude and age just to fuck with some humans and test their belief? A True Believer knows from the Bible that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the earth. They are not allowed to question.

via
*This site is slow to load but worth the wait.

Palin

I'm still trying to get my head around what the Nazis* are doing with Mrs. Palin. They introduce this absolute stranger 7 weeks before the election and then refuse to let her speak or for anyone to question her past in any way. They seem to be using the popular Christian Right tactic of shouting about how they are being "attacked" by the "liberal press," leading to a perception amongst the idiots of this country that they are some kind of innocent, oppressed minority.

Here are some questions I would like answered:

1. Why does she keep saying she opposed the "Bridge to Nowhere" when she actively lobbied for it until the Congress killed it out of embarrassment?

2. She may not be a member of the secessionist movement in Alaska but her husband was. Why is it off limits to enquire about her involvement with this extreme right wing movement? If she never had anything to do with it and opposed her husband's involvement then that's cool. But if she did in fact speak before the group and offered them words of encouragement then I think we need to know this.

3. What actual experience does she have commanding the Alaska Nat'l Guard? The party has touted this as her "executive experience" but they have yet to show she ever gave a single command during her 20 months in office.

4. Her "experience" as a mother has been offered as more proof of what a good Vice President she would be. How can this be offered as proof if we're not allowed to question her about her mothering? Doesn't the pregnant, un-wed, underaged daughter kind of prove she may not have been doing the best job there?

5. If she is so wonderful for making the choice to have a Down's Syndrome child, why is she also so wonderful for wanting to make sure noone else has a choice? Her daughter has also been praised for her "decision" to have her child, i.e. she had a choice. I also wonder how much of a choice her daughter and her daughter's husband-to-be have actually had. On the boy's Facebook site he said (amongst other jock-ish statements), "I don't want children." Hmmmm. We're not allowed to ask questions about this, right?

6. Palin strongly supports abstinence only sex education (which is so oxymoronic it hurts). Isn't the proven fact that this doesn't work combined with her own daughter's pregnancy at 17 kind of beg the question, "Is she really stupid or just ignorant?"

7. Does she really believe that God wants a pipeline through Alaska? Really?

8. Does she also really believe we're fighting a war in Iraq because that's what God wants? Really? That's one fucked up God if you ask me. It also begs the question, does she think God wants us to kill all muslims? Does God want us to take over the world by military force? These are legitimate questions that she is not going to be asked, much less answer.

I could go on and I'm sure I will but I need to go do something busy with my hands before my head explodes.

*a.k.a. Republicans. Let's call a spade a spade, as it were.

Einstein Was a Good Atheist

What he wrote

• The Guardian,
• Tuesday May 13 2008
• Article history

About this article

This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday May 13 2008 on p3 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 11:58 on May 13 2008.

An abridgement of the letter from Albert Einstein to Eric Gutkind from Princeton in January 1954, translated from German by Joan Stambaugh. It will be sold at Bloomsbury auctions on Thursday

... I read a great deal in the last days of your book, and thank you very much for sending it to me. What especially struck me about it was this. With regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common.

... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual 'props' and 'rationalisation' in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things. With friendly thanks and best wishes

Yours, A. Einstein