I didn’t understand half the cultural concepts mentioned when I first read this article: why there are roving bands of eunuchs in India at all, what a “male issue” is (an elaborate term for baby boy?), and why, exactly a group of eunuchs would forcibly chop off some poor kids’ private parts. To be honest, it sounded much like yet another element of the so-called “penis panics” that have from time to time erupted in some Asian cultures.
But from this news of the weird tidbit I stumbled onto yet another intriguing wrinkle in culture and sexuality I’d been completely ignorant of.
Meet footballer (that’s AMERICAN footballer) Cedric Wilson: former wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Why former? Dude hit his girlfriend, apparently out at a bar. Fair enough. Not acceptable behavior on the Steelers.
Now meet linebacker James Harrison:
On March 8, Harrison was charged with assaulting his girlfriend, Beth Tibbot, in her Ohio Township home. According to a police affadavit, Harrison broke down a door, broke Tibbot’s cell phone in half as she attempted to call 911, then slapped her face with an open hand, knocking off her glasses. He was charged with simple assault and criminal mischief and faces an April 3 preliminary hearing before a magistrate in Bellevue.(emphasis added)
Sounds like some pretty messed up behavior, no? Well, according to the teams’ chairman, Harrison’s place on the team is secure, because he had a good reason. What reason? Here’s the chairman’s explanation:
“What Jimmy Harrison was doing and how the incident occurred, what he was trying to do was really well worth it,” Rooney said of Harrison’s initial intent with his son. “He was doing something that was good, wanted to take his son to get baptized where he lived and things like that. She said she didn’t want to do it.”
Now, I know believers have every reason to think that baptisms are good and important things to do to their children. But I hope everyone, believer or non, would still agree that baptisms are not exactly the sort of immediate emergency situation that would make it “really well worth it” to break through a door, destroy a cell phone being used by a frightened woman to dial the police, and slap that woman in the face.
My recent missive on the Christian doctrine of sin and salvation has attracted quite a number of readers, but nowhere near as many critical comments as I would have expected. That’s too bad, as always: I really do like and appreciate people that have something to say in return. I’m not opinionated because I think the world lacks ready access to my brilliance, or because I’m positive my ideas are flawless: I’m opinionated because I know that those opinions are worthless unless put to the test of other critical minds. You, the reader, can do a better job of weeding out my weaker rhetorical wanderings than I could ever do myself. To live, to learn, is to engage.
That said, there are the sorts of critical comments that just don’t help further that ideal.
The most recent, by Ward from Venison Tickle, exemplifies everything that’s frustrating about content-free Christian apologetics, and its all rounded out by an appalling attempt at special pleading that you simply have to read to believe. And I figured it would be quite worthwhile to highlight a bit of my back and forth with Ward as an illustration of the very problem I’ve been talking about. Ward in quotes, my responses… not in them:
I’m always interested to read the points of view of the jaded, the disconcerted, the disheartened, the downfallen, the ambivalent, the indifferent, those who claim they once believed, those who made false professions of faith or simply those who try to rationalize faith down to a science when it is not one.
That’s strange, because you don’t sound interested, you sound sort of sarcastically pissed off and bitter…
And folks, it’s just terrible. The essay is a mess from start to finish, seemingly utterly impervious to absurdity of its arguments in the face of everything from logical consistency to actual positions of his targets.
Women love education; it’s the actual application they don’t particularly like. Whereas the first thought of a woman who enjoys the idea of painting is to take an art appreciation class, a similarly interested man is more likely to just pick up a paintbrush and paint something – usually a naked woman.
…
Of course, this will sound to equalitarians and their sympathizers like nothing more than male whining, but it’s nothing of the sort. Because they are the intellectual driving force of humanity, men will be fine. They will simply continue to do what they have always done and pursue the same challenges they have always pursued, focused on the realities of success rather than its superficial attributes. It is the institutions they are exiting, voluntarily and involuntarily, that will be destroyed instead. It is written that “women ruin everything”; having destroyed the liberal arts, the classics and the pseudo-sciences, it is now abundantly clear that the more rigorous sciences are next on the equalitarians’ destructive agenda. And so, in the not-too-distant future, two plus two will finally be determined to equal five if a women feels that it should, or at least it will as long as she happens to feel that way. (emphasis added)
Seems like everyone’s been talking about Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kerns and her little tirade against homosexuality. Kerns believed she was speaking to a small group of like-minded supporters, but when the audio got leaked, she instantly became a national embarrassment:
I am totally against hate speech. Always have been and always will be. What you heard on YouTube was from a talk I gave on the aggressive movement to fund homosexuals and pro-homosexual candidates across the country and here in Oklahoma now that an openly homosexual is running for a statewide seat. The account given on YouTube took my words out of context and omitted other parts stringing certain words together to make it appear I was engaging in hate speech. I was not and would never do such a thing. The YouTube account is a blatant misrepresentation of my talk.
Now, the remarks clearly do seem to be edited, but as far as I can tell, edited mostly to highlight hateful, ridiculous claim after claim rather than to substantively distort her remarks. It’s quite clear from the video, rather than disguised, that she is railing against “homosexual candidates”: what she doesn’t seem to understand is that this is precisely what people find to be hateful in the first place. Notice also that she doesn’t actually give any examples of things that were distorted or taken out of context. And then there’s the usual “I didn’t say that… I stand by what I said” two-step:
I said nothing that wasn’t true. The homosexual agenda is real, the movement is aggressive, and it is a very real threat to the sacred institution of marriage and the traditional family unit. They are actively seeking to remove conservatives from the political arena. My talk was to a Republican group and I was speaking about the homosexual agenda to defeat conservative Republicans. They want to silence anyone who does not approve their lifestyle. They want their freedom but don’t want those who disagree to have their freedom.
Notice how supporting this or that candidate is all of a sudden an attempt to “silence” people or deny them their freedom. Again, no actual examples are given as to how anyone is silenced or denied any of their freedom. Meanwhile, this is the very woman trying to censor any books from school libraries that mention gay people in a positive light. As with the Intelligent Design film Expelled!, talking about “freedom of speech” here is simply an attempt to change the subject: restating that someone has the right to say something is not an answer to the question of whether you agree with it or support it, or whether it has merit. The fact that someone is free to speak does not mean that voting them out of office is silencing their views. It’s judging them and responding to them.
But what’s truly pathetic is the way she tries to hide behind her religion in excusing her opinions in her media responses. The fact that someone believes that their bigotry is endorsed by a holy text doesn’t make you one iota less morally responsible for holding those views. People who believe that they are acting under orders do not suddenly become blameless for carrying them out, and certainly not with the sort of passion this woman demonstrates. The Bible doesn’t contain any of the psuedo-scientific nonsense she peddles about gay life-expectancy: that stuff was actively made up and promoted by activists trying to demean and attack gay people.
If you’re going to hate on gays, fine. But the fact that you think you have God on your side is irrelevant to whether or not you deserve condemnation, nor does it magically transform your bigotry into “facts.”
I think a good measure of whether or not you and I can get along is whether or not you find the people in this story to be as utterly deranged as I do. Somehow, I don’t think treating Hanukkah as if it were an opposing football team is really what Santa Claus intended.
Update: Atheists get in on the game, though in this case, seemingly to prove a point about what an open forum on public lands really means (i.e. you can’t only have the opinions you like).
If you thought the far left went overboard in their implausible fears of George Bush as eternal dictator, wait till you get a load of the depths of paranoia the far right has in store at the very thought of a President Clinton.
To be honest, I’m not all that psyched about the possibility of White House Hillary myself, and bringing back the “Fairness Doctrine” is just about one of the worst ideas anyone has had since we eliminated the Fairness Doctrine. But forgive me if I don’t ever stoop to grostesquely butchering poor Martin Niemöller’s “first they came for” poem for something as petty as shilling for a particular party primary candidate.
Via Anxious MoFo and Vintage Ads comes a peek at possibly the only pay-per-minute telephone call I’ve ever wanted to make:
What makes it even better is that this ad aired during a television showing of KISS meets the Phantom of the Park. My guess is that when you call the number (now, sadly, disconnected), someone comes on and tells you that you will never, ever be even half as cool as KISS.
“The Blessed Virgin Mary is trying to tell us something. A miracle is going to happen in the next few weeks. What, when, why, I don’t know but I feel she’s trying to tell us something,” said Joanne Deconcini.
Well sure: I know that whenever I want to tell my wife to pick up some more Coke Zero on her way home from work, I never outright tell her this: instead I just cryptically email her a blurry photo of myself. How, when, why this would work, I don’t know, but this one time she brought home some leftover Chinese food, which was sort of a miracle.
Seriously though: if Mary has a message, and if she has the power to bend light or burn images into garage doors, why not just write out her message in nice, big letters, or maybe at least attempt sign language? Why appear as just a jiggling indistinct blob? If this is some sort of game of spiritual charades, these aren’t exactly helpful clues.
“I think it’s wonderful, actually, that there’s actually an image on somebody’s garage door and she moves back and forth and she doesn’t stay still. To me it’s a blessing for me to have her here in Minersville,” said Peggy Mayhue. (emp added)
Look, obviously the people here are searching and sincere, and I hope they get a thrill out of this or even that it helps motivate them to do something good. But these have to be some of the silliest examples of pareodalia I’ve ever seen. Even Bugeyed Pancake-Jesus was a better likeness of a person.
The worst part about this story is the people’s attempt at some token skepticism: “witnesses also said if you touch the image no shadow from the sun appears. The image remains.” But if you are going to try to debunk something, why be timid? Get a heavy blanket, hold it above your head and then blot out all possible external sources of light (including those reflected from below) with you inside up against the garage: either the image will then appear on the back of the blanket instead, or it will remain on the garage with you in the dark. Either way, you’ve at least learned something, which is a whole lot better than just standing around in the street.
Update: Remember the claims about how the light cannot be put in shadow? Watch the video at this blog about the story. Sure looks like people’s shadows are blocking it out to me…
Instead, I predict that comments will be by and large unmoderated, but on issues of substance pretty much ignored. Their true purpose will be to serve as a source for “nutpicking” so as to spice up their complaints of persecution and periodically provide a tsk tsk to “science” for being so close-minded and emotional. This is an on message promotional vehicle after all.
The latest missive from the film’s blog (now apparently deleted!) fits this pattern, albeit somewhat cryptically. But it does manage to lay out at least one goal pretty plainly:
“It’s good to be hated by the right people.”
— Attributed to Johnny Cash
To which someone or something named “Deacon Blue” (a Steely Dan song? a Scottish pop band?) gives a hearty “Indeed“
So, let’s see: setting out to be hated? Isn’t that sort of behavior ordinarily called, well, trolling?
And then there’s this gem of aforementioned back-patting:
And if we re-read Ben Stein’s words here again and again (as I have)…we may still not quite comprehend the full implications of his thoughts. But keep trying, if you misunderstood them…it’s worth it. (emphasis, amazingly, in the original)
Oh boy…
Update: Oh crap. Score one for Orac and Elsberry. It seems that the somewhat loopy post I referenced has fallen down the memory hole, along with all its comments. Additionally, the movie’s associated production company Rampant Films is looking decidedly curious. After someone tried to stop by their offices, only to find residential apartments, their address vanished from the contact section of their website.
No Comments » | 
Culture, Feminism, Gay, Gender, India, Medicine, Oh boy..., Religion, Sex, Spirituality, Tragedy, Woo | 
Permalink
Posted by Bad
I almost hate to comment on these sorts of stories, but apparently the Blessed Virgin Mary has more messages for mankind, and 
