Superstitious Insanity in Saudi Arabia

An article went up on CNN Friday morning detailing the bizarre case of one Ali Hussain Sibat, a Lebanese man currently on death row in Saudi Arabia. It discussed how his lawyer is optimistic that this father of five might not be executed for a crime he was arrested for in 2008. So what heinous crime did Sibat commit to deserve such a harsh sentence, especially one due to be carried out so quickly? Surely he's a murderer, cannibal, or serial rapist, right? After all, Saudi Arabia's an ally of the United States and considered to be one of the Middle East's most modern countries. I mean, this guy couldn't possibly be awaiting decapitation¹ for some crazy, made up crime that only the most backwards parts of the world would even have laws about, right?

Right...?

Wrong. Ali Hussain Sibat's life hangs in the balance because last November he was convicted of sorcery. Sorcery.

In Saudi Arabia, being a wizard is crime.

Apparently the details of the case haven't been made fully public, but the article indicates that Mr. Sibat was, for all intents and purposes, some kind of telephone psychic in Lebanon. He was arrested by Saudi Arabian religious police while he was visiting the country as part of an Islamic religious pilgrimage. I'm very curious to find out if they were lying in wait to arrest him (Perhaps he's prominent in the region?) or if he actually did something to attract their attention. In any event, the fact that there are even laws on the books anywhere in the world that so much as treat wizarding as a real thing boggles the mind.

Even though his death sentence was upheld on appeal in March, it appears that Mr. Sibat probably won't face the headsman thanks to the intervention of the Lebanese government. Really though, it saddens me to think that in the 21st century there's international debate over whether freakin' sorcery is a punishable crime.

Naturally I'll try and keep up with this story and will keep readers abreast of any developments.

1.) Turns out they cut people's heads off in Saudi Arabia. Who knew?

A Collector's Dream...?

Everybody knows about "Chick tracts" - those shrill evangelical mini-comics that one occasionally finds in hidden in public places as a means of stealth ministry. I don't think they're as popular now as they once were (I've noticed that I encounter a greater number of Ray Comfort's million dollar bills these days than anything else related to proselytizing.), but they're still out there. I suspect that a troubling number of folks take them seriously, but I think that, as a classic example of Poe's Law, the things are a hoot. A few years ago I even decided I was going to start collecting them for fun and profit, but unfortunately I just haven't run into that many. To make matters worse, I never found any of the really good ones!* You can imagine my disappointment. What ever was I to do?

Well, a solution has finally been offered for all of us down-on-our-luck Chick tract collectors. You can now buy the (nearly) complete set online for the low, low price of $14.95. That's really not much of a deal, since the things cost about 15 cents individually and by my count you're only getting 97 comics and the retail catalogue, but it does save you the time of going through and manually adding one of each comic to your shopping cart. The set also apparently comes with a handy-dandy collector's box.

I imagine it's weird for some of my readers to see me actively hawking religious nutjobbery on here, but honestly these things are hilarious. They're also a window into the minds of many of our fundie friends and neighbors and they bring up some interesting questions. For example, do some fundies really think all atheists are inexplicably hairy guys with bad skin who will actually recoil from a KJV Bible like a vampire being threatened with garlic? Seriously, if you've never had any experience with Chick tracts, check'em out. They're freakin' epic. Just don't go in expecting any nuance or theological sophistication.

PZ, is that you? In Jack Chick's world, this is how atheists look and act.

*The last one I encountered was a copy of "No Fear?", an anti-suicide tract. I found it in, of all places, the restroom at a Panera Bread restaurant. I guess someone stuck it in there for the benefit of the disconsolate masses who were unable to swap out their baguette for a bagel.

Delightful as Always...

I saw this over on Bay of Fundie this morning. The rancor in the letter is representative of only the most extreme redneck fringe of the population, but some of the reasoning (e.g. "Freedom of religion only means you get to choose what kind of Christian you are.") is actually pretty close to arguments I've heard in person from otherwise intelligent people. Oh well. Follow the link to get a gander at some good old-fashioned Christian inclusiveness.

The War on What Now...?

As I'm sure most of you have guessed, my favorite place to hang out online is the website for the American Family Association. It's a website run by fundagelical oddballs who spend most of the year obsessing over what the gay folk are doing, but this time of year they really start caterwauling about the good ol' "War on Christmas".* All of this generally takes the form of a whole lot of pissing and moaning about companies that use the term "holiday" rather than "Christmas" in their advertising. (You know, because they couldn't possibly be selling Hanukkah or New Year's stuff at the same time.) The AFA even goes so far as to promote a "Naughty or Nice List", complete with the phone numbers of the offending companies so people can call and complain. If you're so inclined, you can also order buttons and stickers emblazoned with the slogan "It's Okay To Say Merry Christmas". (I was going to take a dig at them about the prices, but they're actually quite reasonable.)

The AFA lives in a fantasy world where "there are companies and individuals who want to ban "Merry Christmas" and replace it with 'Holiday Greetings'". Now I'm not sure AFA chairman Don Wildmon does his shopping, but I certainly don't see any paucity of "Merry Christmas" stuff lying around. Hell, the stores had Christmas stuff out before Halloween. What I do know is that by whining about how "Merry Christmas" is the only acceptable holiday greeting and getting their undies knotted up about freakin' Best Buy not using the word "Christmas" in their newspaper ads, AFA is completely missing the point: There is no war on Christmas because Christmas has already been secularized.

I myself will be putting up a Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving and I'm a freakin' atheist. It will even include my (atheist) girlfriend's saccharine-sweet "Precious Moments" nativity in which all of the characters are macrocephalic, doe-eyed baby-people. And, horror of horrors, I'll even play a fair amount of religious Christmas music because it's not nearly as annoying as the rock-a-billy crap that gets passed off as Christmas music these days.

"What the hell", I can hear you ask, "Why would an atheist do something like that?"

Because it's what my family did when I was a kid and I enjoy it. There's something to be said for harmless tradition - Just ask the British, up to 44% of whom are atheists (Source), but who still, stunningly enough, have freakin' Christmas. You don't have to believe in something to have fun with it - see Halloween, for example, or note that I still call today "Wednesday" even though I don't believe in Odin. I bet that very suggestion burns some people up, but it's true. I can go through all the traditional Christmas motions: Put up a tree, listen to carols, bake cookies (Okay, so I can't do that, but my girlfriend can.) utilize reciprocal gift-giving to express a fraction of my feelings of affection for my family and friends, even go to church with my folks on Christmas Eve, enjoy every single minute of it...and not believe even a tiny bit of the supernatural hokum attached to it.

Santa knows that Christmas has already been largely
stripped of its religious significance.

The AFA doesn't get that. They don't care if I don't believe it, they just want to see me going through the motions, and that's jacked up. They can't conceive of a smiling atheist at Christmas. They seem to think that we all going around shaking our fists and peeing on people's Christmas lights - as if by bullying other people into acting a certain way we could actually change what they believe. But there's a good reason the AFA should feel that way: Their whole modus operandi is built around bullying people into acting a certain way. That's what the whole "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" ballyhoo is about - trying to strong arm people into expressing good intentions in one particular way and claiming that the other is unacceptable. The AFA wants to grumble, groan, and cry foul until, instead of two innocuous greetings that don't actually offend anyone, we have one greeting that Christians are supposed to be offended by because it's not "Christian enough" and another greeting that's been weaponized into a big middle finger to everyone else. What exactly is the good that comes of that?

The whole idea championed by some of these religious groups that appearance is everything is something I don't get. Are they honestly so insecure in the reality of their religion that the celebration of their biggest holiday is thrown into disarray because the phrase "Merry Christmas" doesn't appear anywhere in the Sunday ad from the Gap? Are they so adamant that every state capital needs a taxpayer-funded set of nativity figures that they forget the fact that they can put 50 nativity scenes in their own front yard if they want to? Are they really so terrified that there might be (gasp) secularists around that they'll get pissed off if someone has the temerity to wish them "happy holidays"?

The problem for the AFA and similar groups is that society (including 92% theistic American society) really has created a modern version of Christmas that has as little to do with the Christian one as the Christian one has to do with the pagan solstice celebrations that most of its rituals are borrowed from. That's the trouble with memes - they evolve and change over time. It's also why I'd be comfortable making a bet that many more people will watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer than go to church this Christmas.

*They also host a weekly all-Christian TV and Podcast program about how Christian folk are "silenced". Don't think about it too much or you'll realize that it's the very definition of irony.

A New Business Model...?

Are you worried that you might be left behind to face tribulation when the Rapture comes? I'm not either, but maybe you know someone who is. Apparently that whole scene is a major concern for a fairly large chunk of Americans. A couple of quick Google searches indicate that a lot of Christians are afraid that they're not actually saved - that is to say, they're afraid they only "think" they're gonna go to heaven and that when the end of the world arrives Jesus is actually gonna wallop them with a sack of doorknobs and throw them into hell. Folks are also worried that the same fate awaits their families, as evinced by this article about what to do if your family is hellbound.

Most of this talk revolves around trying to "save" the individual in question (kind of like my one friend's son was trying to do when he plastered one of my books with sticky notes about Ray Comfort.), but there's an emerging trend of just giving up and accepting that your sinful friends and family just won't get Raptured. If only there was a way to say "I told you so" after the fact. Then they might accept Jesus and retroactively get into heaven after Armageddon.

Yeah, if only there was a way...an expensive way...

Oh wait, there is! For a mere pittance of $40 a year You've Been Left Behind will send up to 62 of your friends and family members a nagging message of your own devising after the Rapture. It seems like a risky gambit though. The e-mail messages will only be sent out if 3 of the 5 administrators for the site fail to log in for something like 5 days in a row. Presumably they won't log in because they've been Raptured, but isn't that being pretty optimistic about what percentage of people are going to be Raptured?

Lunatic writer Tim LaHaye estimates that maybe 50% of Americans will be Raptured, but a number of other lunatics disagree, claiming that the number will be much, much smaller. * You've Been Left Behind is premised on the idea that at least 60% of its administrators will be Raptured, but how can believers rest assured that this will happen? What if none of them get Raptured? Then a whole bunch of believers will be out a ton of cash and their friends won't even know that the world's ended! They'll never get that last soul-saving e-mail, they'll go to hell, and all the righteous folk will be out $40. Poor bastards.

Luckily your old pal Skippy has a solution. As a filthy, stinking atheist, I'm guaranteed not to get Raptured even if it were actually real. Listen up, Bible Believers - for a mere $15 a year I'll keep a list of all of your suspected sinner friends. Then, if I wake up one morning and there's an army of demons marching down the street, I'll send them a "Holy crap, it's real!" e-mail the instant I'm done putting on a clean pair of pants. How could it possibly go wrong?

*My own prediction is that somewhere around 0% of people are going to be Raptured, but that's just me.

The End of the World As We Know It...

I have to confess that there's a certain aesthetic to films from the 40s, 50s, and 60s that I find appealing. I suppose it has a lot to do with the degree of unintentional camp that goes into them. In any event, I get a lot of mileage out of the old public service films from way back when, stuff like Soapy the Germ Fighter and Duck and Cover (Remember, if an atomic bomb goes off next to you, look out for falling glass and cover up with a newspaper!). With that in mind, I was perusing Youtube for that sort of thing yesterday and I made an amusing discovery.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that there were also public service films from the 1940s about the Rapture, but there are. They're almost exactly as convincing as all the Rapture films made recently, which is to say that they're extraordinarily hokey. I've embedded one below in two parts. Honestly these aren't a lot of fun to watch, but it's an educational experience to see just how the fundies did their fear-mongering in the years before Tim LaHaye and Kirk Cameron. Enjoy.

FLDS: Mass Child Rape in the Name of Religion...

It's usually easy and fun to make light of Mormonism, one of the more transparently manufactured Christian heresies. Made up by an illiterate huckster less than 200 years ago and pandering shamelessly to his most libidinous and base patriarchal fantasies, Mormonism, and the larger Latter Day Saints movement, is, overall, pretty deserving of mockery. The issue of polygamy is the one that most comes to mind when talking about the Mormons, though the majority of LDS groups have abandoned the practice (somewhat grudgingly). Today it is officially practiced only by scattered "Fundamentalist" LDS groups. (The FLDS, as they like to called themselves.) On closer examination, however, we can see very clearly that the fundie Latter Day Saints movement is far from a laughing matter.

Now, ordinarily I go by the theory that what two (or more) consenting adults to with each other in the privacy of their own bedrooms is neither the state's concern nor my own. Indeed, in terms of adult polygamy I feel the same way - as long as everyone knows what they're getting into beforehand and is free to bow out if they want to, I don't really care what adults do with each other. That goes for Mormons and everyone else. The problem with a lot of the fundie LDS folks, however, is the issue of child marriage. You see, many of the polygamist LDS communities like to "spiritually" wed young girls, some of them not even teenagers, to horny LDS elders that are old enough to be -my- father. Then they proceed to "spiritually" have sex with them, "spiritually" bang out more babies, "spiritually" abandon many of the male children, and then "spiritually" start the whole practice again with a whole new generation of girls. God be praised!

No, wait, that's fucked up.

I shouldn't need to explain why that's different from consenting adults, but I'm going to anyway - A 30 year-old woman who got married to a 40 year-old when she was 9 doesn't count as a consenting adult once she grows up and is still stuck in that marriage. To use a term I don't much care for, she's been brainwashed by her religion and her social situation. It is no different, and I mean no different at all from a kidnap victim exhibiting Stockholm Syndrome. She didn't opt into it at 9, there was no decision-making process on her part, she was thrust into a situation and has been taught that there's no other valid way of living, and now she's being used, literally, to manufacture a new generation of victims. It is child abuse writ large.

Likewise with child abandonment. It's an issue that isn't brought up as much, and the press does the issue a disservice by euphemistically referring to it as the phenomenon of "lost boys. Some LDS communities, nominally for spiritual reasons (of course), abandon or "excommunicate" teenage boys just to get them out of the community. Why would they do that? Come now, that doesn't take much imagination. Any population is going to give birth to more or less an equal amount of males and females, but fundie LDS elders want a large number of the female babies for themselves (spiritually, of course), leaving a surplus of boys. Boys that might, I should note, pose a threat to the harems of the elders. Hence, for any of a number of so-called sins, a large number of teenage boys are conveniently expelled from the community and left to fend for themselves in an outside world that they've been taught from birth to fear and revile. Once again, this is child abuse writ large.

I bring all this up because of a raid last week of fundie LDS leader Warren Jeffs' compound in Texas. Jeffs, as you'll recall, is in prison for arranging the "marriage" of a 14 year-old girl to an older cousin, an arrangement than culminated in her repeated rape. Well, a phone call to police by a 16 year-old girl (who is now missing), brought authorities to the Yearning for Zion Ranch, where they found hundreds of women and children, many of them showing clear signs of physical abuse, living in an insular LDS community. Hopefully this investigation will run to ground this particular group and their "spiritual" practice of organized mass child rape.

There are numerous interesting news articles on this matter, and I refer you to two of them in particular (here and here) because I haven't the stomach to recount the matter myself.

I also refer you to an excerpt on Mormonism from Christopher Hitchens' book God is Not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything, from Slate.com. Hitchens is a firebrand and I don't always agree with him, but his account of the founding of the LDS movement is without any misty sentimentality for the group's religious nature and lays bare its laughable origins. Here's the excerpt.

Ray Knows Pornography When He Sees It...

...and brother does he see it everywhere. He recently wrote a blog post deriding the work of Gustav Klimt as pornographic, comparing it to the crude cartoons you find in public restrooms. (Readers may recall a crude cartoon I recently found in a public restroom.) So what are these lascivious works of perversion that Ray is leading the faithful into battle against?

This?













Or this?





















Or maybe this?
















Brother, I've seen pornography. This isn't pornography. This isn't even a case of "one man's porno is another man's art". It's just plain art, no two ways about it.

Normally I don't use harsher words than "disingenuous" to describe people who stretch the truth, but this time the situation is different.

Ray, you're a liar.

Even More Fundie Isl....Jewish Insanity...?

I guess there's fundies and weirdos among every religion, but I'd never really heard of fundie Jewish folks before an NPR report this morning. Apparently there's an "ultra-orthodox" (read: fundie) Jewish sect called the Harediim which normally cloisters itself in one neighborhood of Jerusalem. All is well and good when they're left to their own devices, but rising housing prices have forced some of them to move out into the suburbs where they have to live with other people. Naturally they're tailoring their way of life to help them merge seamlessly with their new neighbors.

No, wait, that's what rational people would do. Turns out they're posting angry signs everywhere and beating up people that don't comply with their pre-medieval standards of "modesty".

Most of this immodesty comes, of course, from women who no longer feel the need to live under the sway of gender roles from the time of Moses. Ladies wearing jeans, or with their hair exposed, are being immodest according to at least one of these whackjobs:

"When dealing with this issue of Torah, your mind has to be much more settled and can't be jumping around to all sorts of different planets and all sorts of different fantasies and thoughts that might come up on a teenager's head..."

This whackjob, you see, is an 18 year-old Harediim kid who can't come to grips with the fact that he might accidentally have an impure thought while he's studying his torah. Adds this particular simp: "We're not trying to change people, but they must respect our way of life."

Actually chief, you're wrong. The rest of us don't have any obligation to "respect your way of life" by changing how we go about our own. No one's going to leap on you and jam an iPod in your ears while forcing you to look at red-hot porno, but you don't have any right to, say, beat up an man and a woman for sitting together on a bus, or send threatening letters to a guy because you can see his TV through his window.

The entire blood-boiling article is on NPR's site here. The article also details steps that the police have taken to stand up for the rights of the other citizens in the community. It's good to see that authority figures in the community are standing up to these weirdos, but it's also a worrisome thing to see, in a land already torn by religious strife, a bunch of freakshows inflicting violence on their co-religionists for not being fundie enough.

Can't resist this one...

Okay, so this has long since been on Pharyngula AND Bay of Fundie, but I just have to have it embedded on here too. This is probably the most cringe-worthy religious/political diatribe I've heard this election season. I'm just going to show the video without commenting any more on it, except to say that these folks could use a visit to Snopes.

It's like a treasure hunt!

I can't imagine anyone converting from one religion to another on the basis of something they found on the ground. The idea of picking up a profoundly life changing piece of refuse just plain eludes me. That being said, here in Kentucky there are diverse religious groups who bank on just that.

The Scientologists for one leaflet the U of L campus regularly and also take out ads in all the local "alternative newspapers". One of my fondest hopes in school was to slip on a pile of Scientology personality tests in front of Ekstrom Library, blow out a knee, and live the rest of my life on L. Ron's coin thanks to a fat lawsuit. Sadly that never materialized, but those silly "Oxford Personality Measurement" things litter the college grounds like cherry blossoms with the coming of each new semester.

Likewise the Seventh Day Adventists, whose hilariously titled book "National Sunday Law: Forces Unite Against Stupendous Crisis" shows up regularly just about anywhere you can fit a pile of the things. I first encountered them when I worked at a Subway during college - every week or so, a man who looked like George Lucas would trundle into the store, leave a dozen of the things on the tray return shelf above the garbage can, and then slink mysteriously back into the night. The Seventh Day Adventists, if you're unaware, make it a centerpiece of their faith that the sabbath should be Saturday rather than Sunday. Christians who use Sunday for the sabbath have therefore obviously been corrupted by a demonic conspiracy and are going to go to special hell. While I'm an atheist, I tend to split the difference by not doing in work on Saturday or Sunday and it seems to have worked out okay so far.

Finally, of course, we come to probably the most ubiquitous form of garbage can proselytizing- Jack Chick tracts. These fearsome little numbers are available in bulk Chick.com and spout a fiery anti-Catholic, anti-gay, anti-science, anti-everything-but-Chick-Tracts form of fundagelical Christianity. They've also become a token of American pop culture, showing up as music videos and even being modified to preach the virtues of prostrating yourself before Cthulhu.

In any event, I stumbled across one of these today in, of all places, the john at a Panera Bread Co. It wasn't even an appropriate one about not being a yuppie or something, it was "No Fear?", which is just about some guy who kills himself and goes to hell. Most Chick Tracts end with someone in hell, often after getting smote down by a 3o-ft tall faceless Yahweh.

I was disappointed not to get one of the good ones like "Dark Dungeons", but "No Fear?" is still going right to the top of collection of mass-market proselytizing paraphernalia. (The previous prize of my collection was a creationist leaflet called "The Big Bang is like a Terrorist Bomb".) If you want, for whatever weird reason, to look at all of Chick's work, they're all available on his website for perusal, some them in multiple languages or "adapted for black audiences", whatever that means. If you were only going to read one, I'd recommend this howler in which Chick explains how dinosaurs went extinct. (In a nutshell, they were hunted to extinction after the Flood because the destruction of plant life made the air too thin for them run away quickly.)

Invoking Poe's Law...

Poe's Law states, and I quote:

"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing."

I think I may be willing to invoke Poe's Law on the guys over at PreachingYourFuneral. Honestly, I'm beginning to think that those guys are perpetrating an elaborate parody of some of the southern super-fundies that skulk around here in Kentucky and in neighboring states. The more I watch their videos (They're up to Rosie O'Donnell now, with Christopher Hitchens on deck and yours truly still apparently out of the running.) the more I expect the nasal redneck up at the pulpit to break down laughing and explain how this was all a remarkably convincing piece of satire.

Only time will tell, I suppose. In the meantime, I still want to be next, so show your support and e-mail these guys every day to remind them what a vile heathen I am.

comment@preachingyourfuneral.com

Hey Mr. Comfort

Ray Comfort is best known to non-evangelicals as the fellow who hangs out in front of lakes with Kirk Cameron and pontificates about the godliness of bananas. Not, of course, that there's anything wrong with hanging out in front of lakes or grooving on a good banana. Where he errs is the chronic vapidity of his reasoning. For example, he seems not to realize that the modern domestic banana is in fact powerful evidence of guided evolution via preferential selection by humans, whereas the wild banana is a lumpy green nightmare that looks rather more like the Frankenstein monster's wang than anything you'd want to eat.

Well, it turns out that he not only has a blog, but that he has it on the same site as this one. I suppose I could have found that out easily a hundred other ways, but I discovered it as a result of the links my pal's fundagelical son pasted into one of my books last week. In perusing his blog, which in some ways resembles a prose version of certain Jack Chick tracts, I stumbled upon a whopper of a post from earlier today. Now I'm not going to cast aspersions on the guy for drawing up a nice straw man about atheists to knock down. Hell, I paint with a nice broad brush when I call people fundagelicals, but c'mon! Money? "Do you love it?" Wowza.

If we want to talk about the love of money, lets talk about the beginnings of the religious resurgence here in the States. Let's talk about Popoff, Roberts, Robertson, and Tilton and their tax free empires. Come back with something better, Ray.

Comfort is also known for his bizarre refusal to accept that atheists exist. No lie. Actually it's a rhetorical device for the book I linked above, but honestly he doesn't seem to realize that his entire book is an argument for universal agnosticism rather than Christianity. Weird.