Category: Uncategorized

Cappucino made inadvertantly from baby formula. Not so good.

Priests seek optional celibacy. I don’t understand Catholics who want to be Catholic, but disregard the Pope and make their own decisions about everything. You’re a Protestant already. Deal with it.

Democracy is overrated anyhow. It certainly doesn’t belong in the church, let alone the Church. And before everybody gets all hissy, keep in mind that almost no one actually believes in democracy. They only think they do.

By the way, where the hell is this much-vaunted blogosphere? If three freshman congressmen from Wisconsin hinted that they wanted to regulate the use of umlauts on the internet in honor of Leif Ericson’s birthday, bloggers would be on the steps of Congress up-ending cans of gasoline on themselves in protest at such an infringement on free speech. But here we have all three branches of the government severely restricting independent speech outside of the dinosaurs of Old Media and the relative silence — minus a few noble exceptions (The Volokh conspiracy, Instapundit) — is deafening.

– Jonah Goldberg, NRO

Jonah, some of us are speaking out. If you don’t hear it, well, that’s too bad. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act is absolutely an unconstitional abomination, but then, it is only the latest among many Supreme Court abominations. It may suit the professional punditocracy to shout and point fingers to no avail – yes, I probably count as one in a technical sense, but I’m in no way an NYC/Beltway columnist – but we’re truly at the beating-a-dead-horse point where the Supreme Court is concerned. From a Constitutional perspective, there is a giant fork sticking out of the back of every justice except Thomas and Scalia. They are done.

So, the issue is a larger one. All three branches of the Federal government have demonstrated in the last three years that they have no respect or regard for the Constitution. WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT THIS? Especially considering that champions of the current administration, including Jonah himself, are unwilling to see or hear any evil of it. Republicans gave us this unconstitutional law, and a mostly Republican-appointed Supreme Court upheld it. So we should vote for more Republicans? I don’t think so.

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act demonstrates, sopratutto, that we need a new party. If you want to oppose it, Jonah, then make the leap. Go Libertarian. You are a conservative, true, but the Republican party is leaving you. As for these terrible laws themselves, civil disobedience is the only answer until we can change them.

And we hear again from Sugar, who is apparently not only ignorant of history, but also irony. Ladies and gentlemen, once more, the irrational atheist.

Vox Day employs the usual tactic of religious apologists in trying to distract people by attacking atheists for their alleged crimes so people won’t focus on the crimes of religion. The fact is, Vox, religion is responsible for most of the wars since the founding of Christianity. (Fascism and Communism are also religions except they worship people on Earth instead of fictitious people in the sky.) And, yes, scholars have estimated that those good Christians killed about 500,000 people during the witch hunts.

Think how many tens of millions had to die and hundreds of millions had to suffer because of Stalin’s religious education. Spare me from the dogmatic mind (are you dogmatic, Vox Day or are you a freethinker?)! By the way, Vox, many of the wars the U.S. engaged in has a religious cast, particularly the wars against the Native Americans, the Spanish, the Mexicans and the Germans (World War I only). American presidents like Bush weren’t the first to realize that religion is a great way to dull the minds of the people, to whip of a war frenzy, and to hold out the mythical promise of an afterlife for those so stupid as to sacrifice their lives (Bush, Cheney, Pearle, and Wolfowicz were too smart to do that during the Vietnam War).

The Dark Ages, the blood of millions of murdered people (men, women, children) and the destruction of billions of lives is on the bloody hands of your religion, Vox. I hope you can bear up under the strain (and the flaming pit awaits you for promoting the lie of Christianity). May you rest in peace!

“We seek a free flow of information…we are not afraid to entrust the American people with the unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to judge the truth and falsehood of its people in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

– JFK

I noticed this quote while perusing the DMN Daily blog, and I imagine it might have something to do with why neither the IRS nor anyone in the Congress will touch the petition of We The People with a ten-foot pole. It also explains why even the simplest questions either go unanswered, or are met with SWAT-style raids. Most Americans are afraid of the IRS and the Federal government; clearly, the feeling is mutual.

You always know that an atheist has run out of arguments when they start complaining that you’re showing insufficient Christian love by methodically destroying their assertions and conclusions. But what does one party’s failure to lead a perfect Christian life have to do with the strength or weakness of a third party’s intellectual position?

The Right Reverend AtheiStar complains: “The brotherly Christian love you bathed [Sugar] in was spectacular and made me feel warm and fuzzy all over. I’m glad to see that you love your neighbor as you would yourself.”

In the very same email, the Right Reverend also complains that I have not responded to his little sophistry on the definition of faith. Yet, I accused Sugar of nothing except historical ignorance – which he had already demonstrated – and pointed out that his chosen examples indicated that he was more interested in haphazardly attacking Christianity than defending his godlessness. Not only did I grant him the benefit of the doubt with regards to his two best examples, but I even protected his privacy, which the Right Reverend did not bother to do. The truth is that I treated Sugar more gently than I would treat my brother or my friends were they to make a similarly shaky argument, and far more kindly then I ever expect to be treated myself.

Condescension is not love. If you want my intellectual respect, then you’d better be ready to earn it through a ruthless willingness to have your assumptions challenged, questioned and even ridiculed. Can anyone seriously argue that I am not willing to undergo the same treatment myself?

More on this soon, but it’s interesting to see how the Supreme Court has erased the 1st Amendment rights of Americans not long after affirming by abdication the erasure of our 2nd Amendment rights. One wonders how long it will be before Americans have to turn to exercising (2) again in order to restore (1).

I am increasingly doubtful that this Constitution will see its 300th birthday. Mr. President, honor your oath of office. Throw these judicial charlatans in jail for treason against the American people.

Sugar writes: This is the usual claptrap from an apologist. Let’s consider some of the “humane” actions of the religious:

1. Thirty Years’ War (in which at least one-third of the German population was murdered in the name of religion)

2. The Inquisition

3. The witch trials (hundreds of thousands of innocent people murdered)

4. The Holocaust (Hitler was a Catholic)

5. The Soviet atrocities (Stalin was raised and trained in a Russian Orthodox school)

6. 2,000 years of hell in which billions of lives were ruined.

It’s no wonder that millions have been sent screaming to their deaths in the name of religion.

And this is yet another feeble attempt of a historically-challenged atheist to hide the responsibility of his fellow godless for the worst evils of mankind. Let’s consider the points:

1. Yes, I’ll give him the Thirty Year’s War. Numbers too high, but okay. The politics of the Habsburg empire had more than a little to do with it as well, of course. But a valid point, although he seems to want to include ancillary deaths, which is never done in the case of WWII etc.

2. Historians estimate around 6,000 people were killed in the 356 years of the Inquisition. This is half the number slain by Turks in the event which prompted Queen Isabella – the State, in other words, not the Church – to instigate the Inquisition. And this is number two on his list?

3. Witch trials – I’ll give him but not the “hundreds of thousands”. Around 65,000 in 250 years is the current consensus estimate. Rather less than the 3.3 million slain in four years by Kampuchean atheists 28 years ago.

4. Most atheists were raised in some religion or another. To what diocese did Mr. Hitler belong? Why did he write to the Nazi heirarchy that the Church had to be destroyed? Why did he describe Christianity as a pathology? Strange behavior for a Catholic, don’t you think? One wonders in what religion Sugar was raised. Shall we number him as one of them for the rest of his life?

5. This conveniently skates over the atheism written into Soviet law, as well as the inherent godlessness of Marxism itself. And, of course, it leaves out Lenin and Trotsky, who only happened to be the architects of the Soviet Union and world revolution. One marvels that Sugar does not assert that Chairman Mao was a Baptist minister. Surely he must have attended a missionary school somewhere.

6. Whatever. Read the Chronicles of the Assyrian Kings if you believe that mass slaughter has anything to do with religion. It can; it usually doesn’t.

In other words, in five examples, Sugar lists two godless atrocities and is forced to go back to 1481, 1618 and 1428 just to find three examples of atrocities he can blame on Christians, amounting to around 375,000 homicides committed over 636 years. Evil, to be sure, but no thinking individual apprised of the historical facts would consider them to be worthy of being numbered among mankind’s greatest tragedies, considering that they cumulatively represent only 75 percent of the number of American children killed every year in bicycle accidents. The total is also less than ANY of the 23 major massacres committed by legally atheist governments in the past 70 years alone. That does not even include the massive Molochian holocaust of global abortion, which can be laid at the feet of secularism if not atheism per se.

If Sugar was seriously interested in attacking religion, he would have brought up many valid Islamic examples ranging from India to the Sudan, but he is more of an anti-Christian bigot than a defender of atheism. At least he was smart enough to avoid bringing up the old atheist lunacy about all wars being caused by religion, which is very easily dismissed. So, give him that, but nothing else.

Ridgelift writes [on Slashdot] “Even though Microsoft’s recently announce they would not be issuing any new patches for the month of December, the boys at Redmond were scrambling today to figure out why some systems are being patched. The reason? They haven’t got a clue.”

It’s bad enough to turn your computer over to a third party. It’s worse to be forced to turn your computer over to a third party. It is totally reprehensible to be forced to turn your computer over to a third party without your knowledge or consent. But it is utterly insane to be forced to turn your computer over to a third party who has no idea what they are doing to it!

I seem to have misplaced an email from someone enquiring about speaking engagments a week or two ago. I’ve been filled in on the procedure by my syndicate, so if you’re still interested, shoot me an email.

[Random absurdity about impersonating Ann Coulter on Fox News deleted upon further reflection. It was funny to me and two of my best friends, but what do they know? Leave Big Chilly alone for ten minutes, and the next thing you know he’s wearing pink chiffon, rolling around onstage in front of 800 people singing Like A Virgin in a deep bass. And as for the White Buffalo, let’s just say that anyone who features a poetry reading accompanied by freeform interpretive dance at their own wedding has some seriously questionable judgment.]

Gravitas: Anywhere But Here