With an eye-catching title like that, you may have been expecting some sort of metaphor or deep poetry at work here, but no, there’s just this awesome tea/coffee cup with the cutest picture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Cthulhu jumping of a trampoline I’ve seen all week on it.

As a skeptic, sci-fi nerd, and big fan of religious parody, I wholeheartedly approve. My friend Kenna paints cups like this by hand, and this one in particular is for sale along with several others, so check out her Etsy shop if you’re so inclined. She does accept customer orders, but I don’t think I can think of anything more awesome or random to paint on a porcelain cup.

(Yes, I know this is completely off-topic. No, I don’t care…it’s fucking Flying Spaghetti Monster and Cthulhu on a goddamn trampoline. STFU.)

Post from: Muckmakers.com

The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Cthulhu, and a Trampoline

If there’s anything worse than kids anymore, it’s their goddamn parents, and while children have an excuse to believe in invisible men and fairy tales, their guardians in this already harsh enough world should have woken up to reality a long time ago. By forcing their prejudices and beliefs on their children in their early formative years, they not only scar them for life mentally, but many times physically as well, all in the name of something that they’ve been too afraid to question all these years. Our first example comes from Oregon; a lovely couple from Beavercreek (Do you need more explanation?) let a mass of blood vessels grow over their infant daughter’s eye to the size of a tennis ball because they figured god would just magically make it disappear. Now they’re facing first-degree criminal mistreatment charges…

The Wylands’ 7-month-old daughter, Alayna, was placed in state custody earlier this month after child-welfare workers received a tip about the untreated and ballooning growth. Doctors said that the condition could cause permanent damage or loss of vision.

The Wylands and their church reject medical care in favor of faith-healing — anointing with oil, laying on of hands, prayer and fasting. The parents testified at a juvenile court hearing last week that they never considered getting medical attention for Alayna. According to court documents, Rebecca Wyland anointed Alayna with oil each time she changed the girl’s diaper and wiped away the yellow discharge that seeped daily from the baby’s left eye.

The area started swelling, and the fast-growing mass of blood vessels, known as a hemangioma, eventually caused her eye to swell shut and pushed the eyeball down and outward and started eroding the eye socket bone around the eye. It’s rare to see a child with an advanced hemangioma because the condition typically is treated as soon as it’s detected, said a doctor who testified at a hearing before Van Dyk last week.

A little faith in god never hurt anybody, right? Tell that to little Alayna, but make sure you tell it to her right side, so she can actually see what the face of an apologist asswipe looks like. That way, when she’s older and hopefully taken away from these brainwashed psychopaths completely, she’ll know who deserves to have anointing oil pumped into every open orifice next time they catch the common cold. While the custody battle is still up in the air, the article does leave us with a great end note…

Timothy Wyland was a widower when he married Rebecca Wyland two years ago. Wyland’s first wife, Monique, died of breast cancer in 2006. She had not sought or received medical treatment for the condition, said Dr. Christopher Young, a deputy state medical examiner who signed the death certificate.

Well, the power of Jesus juju worked so well the first time, why not let your bet against the fates ride once again, right? You’ll notice in the countless stories like these that it’s never the parents who are suffering from the lack of medical treatment, but their defenseless children who can’t (or have been convinced not to) help themselves. At least Monique had the decency to drop dead before bearing a child that she and Mr. Wyland could torture. This time, 44-year-old Timothy chose the impressionably young Rebecca, about half his age at 23, to birth the fruit(cake) of his loins.

If that story doesn’t make you think twice about “honoring your mother and father,” I don’t know what will. Oh wait, I do – Part 2 of this series. Check back soon for another story that’s guaranteed to make you cross your legs in pain…that is, if you still have anything left down there to feel it when these parents are through with you.

Post from: Muckmakers.com

Why Religious People Make Terrible Parents: Part 1

Every once in a while, I question whether or not it’s polite to point out every single time I’m proven even just a little bit more right on something than I already was, but then I realize that I don’t give a fuck and rub it in anyway…

Ethnic Tibetans’ ability to thrive in high altitudes with low oxygen is the fastest genetic change ever observed in humans, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science.

The evolutionary biologists say the results of their study, which compares the genomes of 50 Tibetans and 40 Han Chinese, shows that Tibetans rapidly developed a unique ability to survive in altitudes above 13,000 feet, where oxygen levels are about 40 percent lower than at sea level.

Survival of the fittest…adapting to harsh environments…Yeah, that definitely sounds like the theory that we all incestuously came from two people’s kids in a garden, then were wiped out by a worldwide flood and repopulated by the lone surviving family’s incest. Science may be less kinky, but it’s certainly much more fascinating…

Human adaptation to high altitude is a field of obvious interest, but another reason for the appearance of three studies on the same subject in matter of a few weeks may be that the technology to assess which parts of the genome are under selection has only recently become available.

You mean as science learns more (thus creating new technology), we learn more?! What a concept! Many of you may think this is just common sense, but then you learn that people like this guy actually exist (despite evolution)…

In every debate I’ve had with evolutionary scientists, the arrogant, asinine accusation is made, “Well, evolution is scientific while creationism is religion.” Evolution is about as scientific as a voodoo rooster plucking ceremony in Haiti. Almost.

Chicken bones and pins in cursed dolls? Fucking stupid. Humanity was created by incest and saved from their sins by a god who is his own son and was martyred to please his own will? Totally plausible and rational.

Post from: Muckmakers.com

Further Proof of Evolution Found in Tibet

For once, justice may finally be served in this country…

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal by the Vatican for immunity in a high-profile pedophilia case, dealing a setback to the Holy See as it tries to protect itself from a litany of sex abuse cases. The court refused without comment to consider whether the Vatican had legal immunity over the sexual abuse of minors by priests in the United States, allowing a lower court suit filed in 2002 to proceed.

The plaintiff in the case, identified only as John V. Doe, was abused numerous times in 1965 when he was a teenager, by an alleged pedophile priest, Father Andrew Ronan, in Portland, Oregon. Before being accused of the offences in Oregon, Father Ronan, who died in 1992, allegedly sexually molested seminarians in Ireland and children in Chicago.

The Vatican wanted U.S. courts to throw out a lawsuit that sought to hold the church responsible for moving Father Ronan from Ireland to Chicago and then to Portland despite the sex abuse accusations that followed him from parish to parish. But the nine US judges refused to consider the church’s claim that it enjoys “sovereign immunity” and therefore is safe from prosecution.

I bet there’s millions of John Does out there who were happy to hear this one, and I hope the Church goes broke trying to pay them all off. (Which doesn’t make up for what they did, by the way, but if these lawsuits slowly unravel their credibility as well as their finances, I’m all for it.) This immunity loophole was getting to be almost as large as the holes in their dogmatic arguments, so it’s nice to see that the U.S. court system, which has long been under the thumb of Christianity, is starting to recognize that piety is not analogous to moral perfection. I wonder how many of the Pope’s faithful would flock to see him behind a courtroom stand instead of a pulpit.

And speaking of Pope Benedict and his minions being treated like the criminals that they are, Belgium also isn’t buying this immunity bullshit…

Four days after a series of police raids of Catholic institutions in Belgium that drew sharp criticism from the pope, the reason for the unusually aggressive operation has emerged: a formal accusation that the church was hiding information on sexual abuse lodged by the former president of an internal church commission handling such cases.

The declaration to the police set off four raids in which the authorities seized hundreds of case files from the commission’s current leader, detained a group of bishops for more than nine hours and disturbed the tomb of a cardinal where construction work had recently been done. Investigators drilled into the tomb and lowered a camera, but found only the remains.

Investigators are now analyzing more than two truckloads of seized documents, many related to 475 complaints lodged with the sex-abuse commission after the resignation in April of a popular bishop who admitted that, early in his career, he had molested a boy.

Two truckloads, eh? They’re gonna need a bigger boat if we really want to see justice done – raid the fucking Vatican already. Who’s going to stop them, the beret-wearing, orange-and-blue-striped-jumpsuit sporting Vatican police with their LARPing axes? Seriously, telling the authorities that they have no right access to their archives and private files is like a murderer telling the police that they have no right to look in that freshly dug hole in his backyard. If they truly have nothing to hide, as they continue to claim, then why not let us have a look for ourselves? If you think the shit that got out was shocking, just imagine what’s inside all those locked cabinets. Of course, if these raids were to actually happen, you better believe that there would be so much smoke rising from the Vatican chimney that people would think that a new Pope was just elected. I’m sure a lot of the real hard evidence has already been destroyed by now, but if they’ve been this sloppy (or arrogant, depending on how you want to look at it) all these years, who know what other horrors they may find?

Post from: Muckmakers.com

Catholic Church Finally Being Treated Like the Criminals They Are

Before I begin, no, I did not mean for that headline to rhyme. But I like it, so we’re keeping it. Moving on…

The internet-famous King of Kings statue went by was mocked by many names…Touchdown Jesus, Big Butter Jesus, Drowning Jesus, Super Jesus…but right now, he’s just Burn Victim Jesus. The 62-foot tall, 40-foot wide statue in Monroe, Ohio of some football-crazed Jew went up in flames last week after being struck by lightning during a storm. If you’re not familiar with this gigantic false idol, here’s your basis of comparison…

If there’s one god I’d believe in after that storm, it would definitely be Thor, not that guy. But the Solid Rock Church, who built the statue our of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame (Talk about irony there.), said the $250,000 monument to monumental wastes of money would be rebuilt…especially since it was insured for $500,000.

Let’s take a minute to examine this, shall we? Since real logic cannot be used to discuss religion, let’s use religious logic (A paradox, I know.) for a minute. The hygiene-adverse hillbillies that attend this over 4,000 member megachurch in Bumblefuck, Ohio are the kind of people that consistently beg for a sign from the heavens. If they saw a piece of burnt toast or a skid mark in their toilet that even remotely resembled a bearded white guy, you better fucking believe they’d be on their knees praising god for that non-miracle that did absolutely nothing to affect anyone in any positive way whatsoever. But here we have a bolt of pure electricity descending from the clouds on high to smite an overzealous and overpriced religious symbol whose very existence mocks the simple cloak-and-sandal-clad champion of the poor and downtrodden that this effigy depicts and the reaction is, “Let’s rebuild it.” Wow. You want a sign from god? There’s your goddamn sign, and you don’t even need Bill Engvall to tell you that one, you fucking fatuous piece of trailer trash.

Back to reality, where we realize that this is just coincidental, hilarious, and dripping with the kind of irony that English professors get a boner for, don’t you wonder just how many people $500,000 could feed? You see those goddamn guilt-ridden commercials on TV every day saying that you can feed some kid in Africa for less than a dollar a day; that kind of money could feed a lot of kids for the rest of their lives at that rate, or at least 500,000 kids for one day. What would the founder of this church, a former horse trader and current stock trader, say to that?

The church’s electronic sign had a simple message flashing Tuesday: “He’ll Be Back”.

Lawrence Bishop said in 2004 he was trying to help people, not impress them, with the statue. He said his wife proposed the Jesus figure as a beacon of hope and salvation.

Unless Touchdown Jesus was tossing fishes and loaves of bread with those massive arms of his over to those starving millions, I don’t think he was helping anybody in any meaningful sort of way. Rather than serve as beacon of hope and salvation, why not restore somebody’s hope by actually saving them? The answer is simple, really, so let’s just call a spade a spade – he was a billboard, a $250,000 billboard for a church business with over 4,000 regular customers suckers. And he worked. He worked quite well, and he’ll continue to when he’s rebuilt, I’m sure.

Mike Phillips and Erica Robbe said they plan to store away pieces of the statue.

“For most people, I would hope it represents belief in God and religion — a place something like a memorial,” Phillips said.

Mike is right about one thing – it does represent belief in a god and religion…a big, expensive distraction from what really matters. Burn baby…burn.

Sorry, I just couldn’t end this one on a serious note. Yes, that’s Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning” playing over the video. I have to agree with the YouTube poster – “This had to be done.” Enjoy.

Post from: Muckmakers.com

Touchdown Jesus Burns, No Lessons Learned

I love those moving typography videos all over YouTube, so when I saw this one using the audio from Dawkins answering the “most simplest” question, “What if you’re wrong?” I had to post it. If you haven’t seen the original verbal smackdown, you can watch it here.

And as a bonus, I also found this version, which was animated South Park style…

Post from: Muckmakers.com

Richard Dawkins Typography – “What If You’re Wrong?”

It looks like some more “proof” of god and the afterlife just bit the dust…

A study of the brainwaves of dying patients showed a surge of electrical activity in the moments before their lives ended. The researchers suggest this surge may be the cause of near-death experiences, the mysterious medical phenomena in which patients who have been revived when close to death report sensations such as walking towards a bright light or a feeling that they are floating above their body.

Many people experience the sensation as a religious vision and treat it as confirmation of an afterlife. However, the scientists behind the new research believe that is wrong.

Please, people with degrees instead of funny hats, enlighten us…

“We think the near-death experiences could be caused by a surge of electrical energy released as the brain runs out of oxygen,” said Lakhmir Chawla, an intensive care doctor at George Washington University medical center in Washington.

“As blood flow slows down and oxygen levels fall, the brain cells fire one last electrical impulse. It starts in one part of the brain and spreads in a cascade and this may give people vivid mental sensations.”

Depressing? Not really – I think it’s pretty awesome that many of life’s mysteries can be explained in time, although that time would be a lot sooner if we stopped listening to preachers and started listening to researchers…they tend to read more than one book.

Post from: Muckmakers.com

Doctors Find Near-Death Experiences Caused by Electricity, Not God

When Christopher Hitchens gets it right, he really gets it right, and when President Obama gets it wrong, he gets it really wrong. Elena Kagan, the Solicitor General and Obama’s pending nominee to the Supreme Court, and her office are also quite wrong…Wrong about what, you ask? It seems that both the president and the office of the solicitor general are siding with the Vatican on the child rape cases. The Vatican claims that they are a sovereign state immune from prosecution in the many cases in which the Pope is named as a defendant for remaining complicit or covering up the crimes, and the Obama administration is advising the Supreme Court to agree with them. Hitchens calls bullshit on this one, I have to wholeheartedly agree…

It is not usually considered polite to mention that the majority of Supreme Court justices are practicing Roman Catholics. (Writing about this delicate matter during the argument over the nomination of John Roberts, I did warn that there might come a day when it could pose a double conflict of interest, both in respect of church teachings and in respect of the Vatican’s decision to shelter Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston after he skipped town to avoid a subpoena. This was before it came to light that the current pope had been so deeply and personally involved in the church’s strategy of delay and obfuscation.) We will soon have a Supreme Court that contains no Protestants and no secularists and which is being asked to rule on a matter central to the religious beliefs of a majority of its members, who are bound to regard the man formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger as the vicar of Christ on earth. If they now take refuge in the lesser claim that he is the bureaucratic head of a foreign government, will that serve to assuage their consciences?

That’s exactly what this is – a conflict of interest. This illustrates exactly why the separation of church and state is so essential. Judges are supposed to remain impartial, and the court system is supposed to uphold truth and justice above all else, but if even the country’s highest court is in the pocket of the Holy See, what chance does justice have in these cases? A real judge puts their own personal beliefs and biases aside when deciding a case, but in a country where one cannot even get elected unless they believe in a widely-accepted god, how can we expect them to truly remain impartial? The questions don’t end there…

To give just one example that has not so far had the attention it deserves, the State Department is required by Congress to make an annual report on the human rights record of every government with which we have relations. Yet there is no annual human rights report on the Vatican—or Vatican City or the Holy See, if you prefer. When questioned on this rather glaring lacuna, officials at Foggy Bottom say that for human rights purposes, the Vatican is not a state. It enjoys, for example, only the status of an observer at the United Nations. Very well then, if the Supreme Court rules that it is a sovereign government, then it necessarily follows that it must be subjected to official scrutiny on its rights practices, which in international law include the treatment of children. It will be interesting to see how the Obama administration gets itself off the horns of that dilemma. (It is also perhaps a pity that this question was not resolved earlier, so that we could have had an official U.S. government report on, say, the open complicity of the Catholic Church and the papacy in sheltering the men who organized the genocide in Rwanda.)

Didn’t know about that last one? There’s good reason for that; the Church does what it wants and thinks that it answers to no one – not even god, apparently, and they’re particularly good at persuading the media (and its overall Christian bias) to cover it up, or at least not talk about it, which is essentially the same thing. As the Vatican are hypocrites in everything else, this next part should come as no surprise…

This all arises because the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made a ruling that effectively lifted the Vatican’s immunity under a 1976 law (the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which governs the extent to which foreign entities can be pursued on American soil). The case involves an Oregon victim who was molested by a priest who had been moved, after previous offenses, from parishes in Ireland and Chicago. Other plaintiffs in other states such as Kentucky and Wisconsin have asked the courts to view offending priests and complicit bishops as employees of the Vatican, thereby illustrating the general responsibility of the papacy. The church’s response to this has been especially absurd, claiming that the pope exercises only spiritual authority and not managerial control. The first thing to say about this is notice how it abolishes the church’s other claim to be a political and accountable state! Then ask yourself what would happen to a priest or bishop who expressed doubts about the Vatican’s teaching on abortion or divorce. He would soon find that Rome was very interested in disciplining him. It was Joseph Ratzinger himself who invited Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson all the way from Argentina and back into the fold in an attempt to conciliate Catholicism’s more reactionary wing. It was Rome that gave shelter and succor to Cardinal Law after the long disgrace of his tenure in Boston. Suddenly we are asked to believe that the church is not really responsible for the actions of those who have a sworn duty of obedience to its headquarters? This will not wash. State or no state, the church is a highly disciplined multinational corporation that allows little or no autonomy to its branches and can no more be the judge in its own cause than British Petroleum.

That’s the Catholic Church for you – using weasel words and half-assed excuses whenever they’re asked a tough question. Of course, this is the religion that is so busy hating gays, women, and other religions that they just don’t have any hate left in their little black hearts for child molesters, so I guess we shouldn’t expect much in terms of logic and reason. What we should expect, however, is our lawmakers to uphold the law. Obama and Kagan (who is Jewish, by the way, so she has one less excuse to side with the Vatican) couldn’t be more wrong on this one, and if the Supreme Court ignores these clear cases of human rights violations, then we are no better than the countries we invade in the hope of making them more like us.

Post from: Muckmakers.com

Hitchens on Obama’s Appeasement of the Vatican

Whether you love or hate this polarizing writer/atheist/pundit/alcoholic, Christopher Hitchens has a new book out today, Hitch-22: A Memoir, and the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive so far. It’s practically impossible to agree with the man on everything, but when he gets something right, goddamn does he ever get it right. While he’s known for his frank manner and brutal honesty, this is arguably his most truthful work yet, as he’s not examining religion or the founding fathers in this book, but himself. This is not an easy task for anyone – never mind this obscenely critical and eternally cynical author. Appropriately, his publisher put together this great little video of 22 quotes from Hitchens to promote Hitch-22, so I’ll just let the man speak for himself…

Post from: Muckmakers.com

Christopher Hitchens’ New Memoir, Hitch-22, Released Today

So we’ve been hearing a lot about Sister Margaret McBride in the news lately, the nun working for St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona who was excommunicated for approving an abortion. If you’ve been reading/watching the news lately at all you know the bullet points of the story: The woman in question was already a mother of four with pulmonary hypertension, which doctors said would have killed her and her 5th baby if she carried it to term. Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, who is not a doctor, “disagreed” (How you “disagree” with medical facts, I’m not sure.) and excommunicated the nun for her decision, a decision which pretty much any logical person, despite their beliefs, would have made. Despite the immense amount of media coverage this story has received, a few extra details haven’t been widely reported involving Bishop Olmsted and the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix. A hat tip to The Independent for giving us the full, well-rounded story…

Writing in the left-leaning Huffington Post, bioethicist and medical historian Jacob M. Appel described Olmsted as having a “reputation as a particularly cold-hearted and intransigent figure” who had “gained notoriety for refusing communion to a 10-year-old autistic child who could not swallow”. He added, “Thanks to men like Mr. Olmsted, obtaining obstetric care at a Catholic hospital has become a dangerous game of Russian roulette.”

Wow…what a great guy. He definitely sounds like the kind of asshole who should be dictating morality to people. I bet you he had something else in mind for that 10-year-old to swallow. On that note…

By the beginning of last week, a Facebook page — Allies of Sister Margaret — had been set up in support of the nun, with many of its hundreds of members drawing a sharp contrast between the swift and sure judgment against Sister Margaret and the rather more lenient approach taken against pedophile priests.

Olmsted himself replaced Irish-American Bishop Thomas O’Brien, who, according to an official report, “allowed priests under his supervision to have contact with minors after becoming aware of allegations of criminal sexual misconduct” and acknowledging “transferring offending priests to situations where children could be further victimized.” O’Brien was also later convicted of leaving the scene of a fatal accident, after running over a man in Phoenix. There was no evidence that O’Brien had been excommunicated or that Olmsted considered this a necessary step.

So it’s murder when you flush out an underdeveloped fetus, something a woman’s body does naturally all the time, but when you run a man over with your car, that’s totally cool with god. I must have missed that one in Sunday school. And what makes the pedophilia argument even more relevant in this case is the fact that their last bishop is a child molester who has yet to be punished, or even truly reprimanded, for his crimes. This story just gets better and better.

Speaking of which, the other thing the news has been failing to report lately is that Sister McBride isn’t exactly the moral crusader we’ve been led to believe she is. She faced another tough decision years ago, and she folded faster than Bishop O’Brien drives…

As a senior hospital administrator in a part of the US with more than its share of illegal immigrants, she was no stranger to making difficult, controversial choices. According to the New York Times, St. Joseph’s focuses on keeping down the cost of the uninsured and repatriates about eight uninsured patients per month. One of these people was 18-year-old Joe Arvizu, an undocumented, poor Mexican boy, who suffered from leukemia and had to have surgery to stop bleeding on his brain. His family, however, had no insurance and couldn’t afford the treatment. “They said they knew that we couldn’t pay the bill, so they couldn’t continue with the treatment anymore,” his mother Rosa told local press. “I asked for a payment negotiation, but they said that no, we couldn’t make it with the income we have. I didn’t want to make any decision by myself, but they told me the ambulance was ready.”

Despite his mother’s objections, Joe was transferred to a hospital in Mexico. Joe died on December 3, 2007 — the hospital was unable to supply the blood for a transfusion. Sister McBride was quoted by local press as saying that the hospital’s charity committee reviewed Arvizu’s case but decided he would be able to get adequate treatment in Mexico.

Saying someone would get “adequate treatment in Mexico” is like telling a black man that he’d get adequate treatment at a KKK rally. They couldn’t even give the Mexican hospital some blood for the transfusion? You better believe that if this kid wasn’t an “undocumented, poor Mexican boy,” he’d be alive and well right now. In fact, he’d probably be the Diocese of Phoenix’s cute little white poster boy for the local media, showing how loving and caring the Church is to those in need, despite the lies those “evil atheist/liberal/communist/Nazis” are spreading.

This is just another example of how the right thing to do and the religious thing to do are often two completely different decisions, and even though McBride made the right choice in the mother of four’s case, she’s not the modern saint they’re making her out to be. Maybe this time she just decided to think for herself. Maybe this time she just got fed up. Or, maybe this time, she realized that a life of celibacy, penguin suits, sexism, and archaic doctrine just wasn’t worth another life.

Post from: Muckmakers.com

What You Don’t Know About the Nun Excommunicated for Approving an Abortion