Monday Morality Mashup

Congratulations on surviving the weekend, but if you find yourself taking a bit too much pride in that singular accomplishment you probably fall into one of these three categories.

Number One

You’ve finally collected yourself off the bathroom floor, and are overjoyed that God took your vow of future abstinence as a reason not to kill you outright (as you clung to the commode for dear life).  Good thing that God doesn’t seem to take that promise very seriously or the college death rates in the US would skyrocket.  Don’t worry if you made that promise yourself last weekend. You’ve absolutely nothing to fear.  Drink up.

Number Two

You’re a murderous death row inmate who just got a stay of execution.

Number Three

You are deeply religious, and therefore so scared of dying and going to Heaven you’re overjoyed with every extra day that your savior allows you to exist here in the Devil’s Playground (aka Earth, not just Las Vegas).

Keeping You Accountable

There are all kinds of things that “God” can be credited with keeping you accountable for and not just murder, inebriation or your secret desire to wear women’s lingerie.

It really doesn’t matter which God you pick from.  One God may favor women in burlap, while another yearns for virgin sacrifice.  Some Gods are really into cows, while others deify rats.  The rules of accountability (morality), as outlined in many conflicting ancient texts, are themselves obtuse enough that internecine fractionalization of the major religions is geopolitically destabilizing.  But this isn’t a post about politics, it’s a post about morality and what constitutes the bedrock we should be building our moral foundations upon.

Lottery in June, Corn be heavy soon

What God holds you personally accountable for varies according to your time and place in history. but since this is now in history, and my readership is mainly American, I’ll focus on Christianity.  There’s little sense in deconstructing the lunacy of an Aztec priest ripping the heart out of a heavily drugged virgin for the greater good of society.  Most of us are already pretty sure that form of faith doesn’t really keep the crops from failing, though the stigma of such belief is still apparent in our English literature.

Christian Morality

What the hell is Christian morality these days?  For folks who ground their moral lives around beliefs supposedly written in stone, the shifting sands of Christian morality are changing so rapidly it’s hard to keep them in focus for one lifetime, let alone a millennia.

Shotgun Jeebus – Hommie Don’t Play That.

It is nearly impossible to witness species emerge through physical evolution in the short span of a couple human lifetimes.  It is equally impossible to miss the evolution of Christian morality over a similar timeframe.  Not that long ago a good Christian man was one who properly cared for his slaves, and as recently as last week (in archaeological time) the gays were still being vilified and lambasted by our Christian society, whereas now they’re being wed by US Supreme Court justices.  Next thing you know, Jeebus is going to be back to hitting the bong at the Seattle Hempfest like he was blazing it up back at Woodstock.

The Good Old Days

When I was a kid, God’s hippie son preached peace, forgiveness and charity to the poor.  He was often photographed with an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder, surrounded by braless, misshapen girls in tie-dyed sundresses.. Don’t act like he never even existed!  If you’re over fifty you can’t deny it.  That imaginary Jeebus got kicked to the side of the road long ago, in lieu of a more strident militaristic Onward Christian Soldier version.   Today, there are high level Christians leading the charge to help the poor by starving them to death and they often get together to vainly pray that the worldwide violence they spread won’t end up right back on their doorstep.

Jeebus Wars

The verdict is still out over which imaginary Jeebus will return to the throne in America.  Will the rightwing militant Jeebus retain the throne or has his time passed?  To make things more interesting, there is a growing movement to throw all the imaginary Jeebus’ into the dustbin of history and let them party with the many lost and abandoned Gods before them.

In the meantime, your so-called bedrock Christian morality had better be as flexible as a yoga masters spine because depending on which outlaw territory of America you happen to find yourself in, you’re going to be heavily dependent on currying favor with whatever local warlord happens to run your neighborhood.  It pays to “open minded” and malleable to change in times like these.

Tomorrow:  How in the name of Goodness will we ground our human morality without some form of imaginary Jeebus?   Science can’t possibly project from “what is” to “what ought to be”,  or can it?

Enjoy.

Skepchick is really a Skepdick

Here’s a little bit of serendipitous information that I ran across today.  From the Urban Dictionary

Skepdick;

A person who imagines that their rejection of scientific theories supported by overwhelming amounts of evidence makes them a maverick genius, instead of the ignorant, irrational and incorrigible fool they really are.

There is an enormous amount of evidence that women are perfectly safe at skeptic conventions.  Skepchick, aka Rebecca Watson, is a person who rejects or ignores this reality in lieu of her own distorted view of the world.  There are a multitude of theories attempting to explain away her delusions.  There is a whole new branch of religion being formed around Rebecca and the Girlyban Apologetic Society is said to be quite the happening place these days.  Whatever the case, by ignoring the mountain of available evidence that it is perfectly safe for women to attend atheist conventions, she shows herself to be an ignorant, irrational, and extremely incorrigible SKEPDICK.

Skepchick is the self appointed leader of a small, (yet raucous and raunchy) clique of female feminist skeptics.  Once upon a time, she and her minion seemed to genuinely care about the goals of the organizations they assimilated into.  The predominant male culture that had publicly represented skepticism and atheism initially rejoiced at the thought of adding so many talented and enthusiastic new female members. Their esteemed voices would help to advance the rationalist agenda against what are essentially religiously motivated repressions against women.  It seemed like a good thing for the skeptic movement that women were finally starting to join more forcefully in the struggle to supplant fiction with fact in our society and culture.  At least that is what we were all misled into believing.

What should have been an effortless merging of common interests has turned into nothing of the sort.  The new women of skepticism are apparently too busy playing Don Quixote, chasing after illusory shadows of male dominance and imagined molestations within the organization they infiltrated, to focus on any of the more ominous (and real) threats against the dignity of their gender.  In doing so, they have soured their relationship with many mainstream atheists and skeptics of both sexes.

Skepchick set off my alarm bells when she decided to incite a circular firing squad within the skeptic movement last year.  I labeled her and her hoary band of miscreants the American Girlyban at the time of the elevator gate fiasco.  My tongue-in-cheek synopsis of the situation was not particularly well received by the women of the insurgency.  To be sure, I have not massaged and coddled my arguments in a way that would make them feel all warm and cuddly inside.  I get the same kind of reaction from crazy religious people I confront because I refuse to acquiesce to ridiculous dogma unsupported by evidence.  That is the most pernicious aspect of the Girlyban infiltration.  We are now being asked to believe, ON FAITH, that the situation for women at skeptic meetings is not what most people who go there (and write about) seem to be experiencing.  To hear it from terrorists like Rebecca Watson, skeptical conventions are more akin to a Bacchanalian orgy than a meeting of scientists.  I am guessing attendance at the events would be quite a bit higher if that were really the case.

To be sure, some people have been extra obnoxious to Rebecca since she outed herself as a Girlyban mole last year in statements towards Richard Dawkins and then Lawrence Krauss.  I do not doubt she has had threats.  Try going on the radio in Jackson Mississippi (as I did) at drive-time and postulating that Jesus could easily have been gay!!   She has no idea the animus she would face if she were actually battling with the REAL forces aligned against women!!  I backed off the issue-subject for the most part after the brouhaha settled from the elevator guy accusations.  Thought that was probably the end of that.

No way!!  Ms. Watson decided to go full TFO (totally feigned outrage).  Accusations started flowing like the good wine at the aforementioned orgies, but not against phantom idiots elevator guys!!  This round of totally unfounded accusations would be lobbed at anonymous invited SPEAKERS to the events.  Whoa!!  Anonymous accusations against unnamed perpetrators.  Surely THAT would suffice to get the skeptic community properly focused on the oh, so serious problems of overt sexualization of female skeptics.  Funny thing about TRUE skeptics.  It is in the nature of the group to require facts.  When the facts are examined, it turns out that there have been at least a couple drunks removed from skeptic events over the last decade or so, one of which is accused of vocal harassment of females.  Lately, some girl got handed a business card suggestive of the potential for a sexual swing encounter (It had nudity on it!!).

Let’s be clear.  There have been ZERO, NONE, NADA accusations of physical violence against women at any skeptical event EVER.  So at the end of the day, Rebecca Watson is making a huge freakin’ public relations nightmare for herself, her group of Girlyban supporters, and skeptic organizations she supposedly cares for by publicly stating that she is too scared to attend a rather generic meeting (in the overall scale of things) in a heavily secured CASINO environment.

People go crazy and get paranoid all the time.  It is truly sad.  I think it is likely a result of her recent divorce from her first husband that she has gone total man-hater mode (shhh!! I am not suppose to mention personal stuff about her….she is supposed to exist in a vacuum,  unaffected by the realities of life the rest of us deal with).  I am reasonably sure that her latest dispatch from Girlyban HQ is not really about her being too scared to attend, but just being an attention seeking exercise some people refer to as attention whoring.  I certainly hope that is the case or she truly does need some psychiatric help.   Not even frail little old ladies in walkers with buckets full of coins are afraid to be in a casino.

Enjoy.