Okay, so I know I've not been around lately, but the end of the year is pretty hectic around here. Today I don't have a post so much as a question, and I hope you guys can give me the straight dope on this little wonder that I recently encountered:
Is this...somehow... for real? That is to say, is it intended to be some kind of parody, or are people actually meant to take an NIV Bible covered with checkered flags and interspersed with Nascar anecdotes to be a serious theological treatise? I assume that this has been written in earnest, but I'm holding out hope that it's a hilarious Edward Current-style bit of satire.
Showing posts with label silly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label silly. Show all posts
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
The AFA's Christmas Silliness...
Last year I posted a fairly long article about the American Family Association's "Naughty or Nice" list. Basically, the AFA is a conservative Christian organization that spends most of its time complaining about homosexuals and running political commentaries by such intellectual stalwarts a Chuck Norris. Throughout November and December of every year, however, the AFA changes its focus to poring over every advertisement they can get their hands on to see if they use the word "Christmas" or not. Any company that doesn't slather its ads with heaping dollops of "Merry Christmas" is labelled naughty and placed on a boycott list for AFA members.1
Not much has really changed since last year, save that now the AFA finds it offensive not only to fail to mention Christmas by name, but also to mention it alongside other winter holidays. Seriously. Complaining about a Gap ad that mentions Christmas alongside Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and the solstice, the AFA fumes that:
The American Family Association seems to have a problem seeing past the end of its own nose. Not everyone's a Christian, and not everyone celebrates the same (or any) holidays at the end of the year. It's ridiculous to have a hissy fit just because a company doesn't direct every single one of its advertisements at you. And really, is any well-balanced person going to let his holiday celebration be tarnished by the wording of a Gap ad?
________
1) This is in addition, of course, to the AFA's permanent boycotts of Movie Gallery (for renting porno) and Pepsi (for not hating gays enough).
2.) Let's not overlook Festivus, either.
Not much has really changed since last year, save that now the AFA finds it offensive not only to fail to mention Christmas by name, but also to mention it alongside other winter holidays. Seriously. Complaining about a Gap ad that mentions Christmas alongside Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and the solstice, the AFA fumes that:
...Gap compares Christmas to the pagan holiday called "Solstice." Solstice is celebrated by Wiccans who practice witchcraft!A "pagan holiday called Solstice"? Seriously? Does the AFA not know that the winter solstice is an astronomical event, not just something the "Wiccans" made up? Lots of cultures have holidays situated around the winter solstice.2 Dare I even bring up the fact Christmas is celebrated on the 25th of December in order to make it correspond roughly with the winter solstice?
The American Family Association seems to have a problem seeing past the end of its own nose. Not everyone's a Christian, and not everyone celebrates the same (or any) holidays at the end of the year. It's ridiculous to have a hissy fit just because a company doesn't direct every single one of its advertisements at you. And really, is any well-balanced person going to let his holiday celebration be tarnished by the wording of a Gap ad?
________
1) This is in addition, of course, to the AFA's permanent boycotts of Movie Gallery (for renting porno) and Pepsi (for not hating gays enough).
2.) Let's not overlook Festivus, either.
Monday, September 28, 2009
How Not To Help...
Remember Patrick Greene? He's the guy that threatened to sue Ray Comfort a while back over Ray's silly "April 1st: National Atheist's Day" bumper stickers. Well, he's apparently still around, despite being mocked unmercifully by both the religious folks and his fellow nonbelievers (The Atheist Experience gave him a particularly harsh rhetorical whuppin'.), and he's madder than ever. He's not threatening sue over the bumper stickers anymore; Now he's trying to force Ray to shut down his goofy blog, lest Patrick bring down the wrath of the court system by claiming that Ray is disseminating hate speech.
Freakin' seriously?
According to the Atheist Experience, he sent the following letter to Ray's Living Waters Ministry:
Way to go. Don't you ever get tired of putting your foot in your mouth?
* See Yates v. United States for the Supreme Court decision finding that speech aiming to incite illegal activity is still protected unless it results (or is likely to result) in the imminent threat of violence or other "lawless actions". See also Brandenburg v. Ohio for a similar ruling directly related to hate speech. Ray, while irritating, is certainly not attempting to incite illegal activity with a corresponding threat of imminent violence. Therefore his speech is utterly legal. Ridiculous, brain-dead, cloying, and generally puerile, but legal.
Seriously Patrick, this is Poli-Sci 101. (Actually I think it was POLS 102 - "American Civil Liberties" was the class that turned me on to Political Science in college.)
Freakin' seriously?
According to the Atheist Experience, he sent the following letter to Ray's Living Waters Ministry:
To Mr. Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron,
This is to inform you that over a year has passed since the incident of the threatened lawsuit against your bumper sticker. Since that time I have received e-mails by the hundreds, from atheists all over the world. These atheists have unanimously agreed that the lawsuit idea was not a good one, to put it mildly.
However, after spending the last year going through your blog and your store, and seeing the sheer volume of materials against atheists, I have come to the conclusion that your "free speech" constitutes hate speech.
So, since Christians by their own admission adhere to a "loving" faith, your biblical mandate of spreading the "word" must come in the form of loving rhetoric, not insulting people who do not share your belief, and not instilling hate to your followers.
Therefore, if ALL of your material against atheists is not removed from your website by October 20, 2009, I will file a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Antonio, and ask the court to issue a restraining order to curtail your hate speech.
Sincerely yours,
Patrick Greene
Yeah Patrick, that'll help. It'll help the same way rubbing a lemon juice-soaked porcupine in your eyes helps relieve ocular dryness. Not only are you just plain wrong about the hate speech issue*, but it just feeds into Ray's silly persecuted Christian persona.
Way to go. Don't you ever get tired of putting your foot in your mouth?
* See Yates v. United States for the Supreme Court decision finding that speech aiming to incite illegal activity is still protected unless it results (or is likely to result) in the imminent threat of violence or other "lawless actions". See also Brandenburg v. Ohio for a similar ruling directly related to hate speech. Ray, while irritating, is certainly not attempting to incite illegal activity with a corresponding threat of imminent violence. Therefore his speech is utterly legal. Ridiculous, brain-dead, cloying, and generally puerile, but legal.
Seriously Patrick, this is Poli-Sci 101. (Actually I think it was POLS 102 - "American Civil Liberties" was the class that turned me on to Political Science in college.)
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Seeing Is Believing...?
I've been milling around over at Above Top Secret again (I'm a glutton for self-punishment) and, as usual, it's left me kind of confused. There are few people more imaginative than conspiracy kooks, but they're amazingly unable to grasp the idea that the people of ancient cultures could actually possess enough imagination to create art depicting events and creatures that weren't real. I say this based on this thread about "Alien Influences on Mankind" that basically offers up a slew of weird cave paintings, sculptures and whatnot mixed with comments from a fellow named SuperSlovak to the effect of "if someone made this painting/sculpture/unintelligible blob then they must have actually seen something like looked like it, ergo it must be real!" Longtime readers may recognize this sort of logic from other species of kooks as well, such as our dinosaur-lovin' pal Phil O'Donnelll. (For example, this page on his site that shows, among other things, a statue of a dragon as proof that live dinosaurs still exist.)
One has to wonder just how far such an attitude can possibly extend:
A picture of Red King: Clear evidence that giant rock-throwing monsters
are alive and well and living in Japan...?
One has to wonder just how far such an attitude can possibly extend:
A picture of Red King: Clear evidence that giant rock-throwing monstersare alive and well and living in Japan...?
In a sense though, I suppose that oddballs like SuperSlovak and his ilk are at least internally consistent. After all, they seem to have trouble distinguishing their own fantasies and wishful thinking from reality, so why should they be able to distinguish the products of other people's imaginations from reality?
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
The Non-Controversy of Patrick Greene
I don't hang out at Ray Comfort's blog much these days - he posts about the same half dozen arguments with slightly different phrasing on a rotating basis and that gets old - but on my last trip over there I noticed that he was complaining about some mean atheist guy who was threatening to sue him. The gist of the story is that Ray's henchmen sell bumper stickers that say "National Atheists Day: April 1st" and an ill-humored atheist guy named Patrick Greene saw one, got offended, and made a bunch of noise about how he was going to sue Ray for libel (somehow).
In all honesty, I kind of assumed that the story was, shall we say, embellished. After all, my pal Ray has a story every couple of days about how fierce atheists chase him, yell at him, and occasionally slap him around for, well, being kind of an annoying guy. It seemed as likely as not that Patrick Greene was fictitious and Ray was just trying to sell more bumper stickers. Apparently, however, Greene's real and he's actually an ill-humored guy who complains a lot. I suppose that's egg on my face.
Greene has been grousing around some of the other atheist blogs out there, most prominently Atheist Experience, trying to garner support for his ill-conceived attempt to sue Ray. If he's been looking to muster a storm of righteous fury then he's looking in all the wrong places, because pretty much every atheist site that's mentioned him has done so in the context of "don't do this kind of stupid stuff". I mention him for the same reason: This kind of crybaby, litigious silliness is just plain asinine and gives Comfort and others like him the opportunity to paint atheists as a bunch of sniveling whiners. Ray is well within his rights to make backhanded bumper stickers, and there's no grounds to claim that it's libel because he's not really making any specific claims about anyone. The Constitution and common sense are both on Ray's side (That's a rare occurrence), and all Greene is doing is providing Ray with fodder for his voluminous claims of victimhood.
A few atheists, myself included, have even noted on Ray's blog that Greene's acting like a dingus. Freedom of speech either applies to everyone or it doesn't mean a thing, and going hand in hand with that is the understanding that no one has the right not to be offended. That applies to Ray, me, and everyone else. Disappointingly (though somewhat predictably), Ray has refused to acknowledge that a number of atheists have "crossed the lines" to stand beside him on this matter. Rather, he claims that other atheists "have turned on [Greene]" even though he "thought he was doing the right thing". That's wonderful, especially coming from someone who devoted a lengthy blog entry to mocking the guy - An atheist can either side with Greene, thereby proving that we're a bunch of humorless pricks who can't take a joke, or we can take Ray's side and prove that we're a pack of backbiting wolves who'll savage one of our own if bad publicity strikes. What a great choice.
So that's where it stands. Greene's behaving like a thin-skinned weenie and Ray, as usual, comes across like a smiling jerk...and the world spins on.
In all honesty, I kind of assumed that the story was, shall we say, embellished. After all, my pal Ray has a story every couple of days about how fierce atheists chase him, yell at him, and occasionally slap him around for, well, being kind of an annoying guy. It seemed as likely as not that Patrick Greene was fictitious and Ray was just trying to sell more bumper stickers. Apparently, however, Greene's real and he's actually an ill-humored guy who complains a lot. I suppose that's egg on my face.
Greene has been grousing around some of the other atheist blogs out there, most prominently Atheist Experience, trying to garner support for his ill-conceived attempt to sue Ray. If he's been looking to muster a storm of righteous fury then he's looking in all the wrong places, because pretty much every atheist site that's mentioned him has done so in the context of "don't do this kind of stupid stuff". I mention him for the same reason: This kind of crybaby, litigious silliness is just plain asinine and gives Comfort and others like him the opportunity to paint atheists as a bunch of sniveling whiners. Ray is well within his rights to make backhanded bumper stickers, and there's no grounds to claim that it's libel because he's not really making any specific claims about anyone. The Constitution and common sense are both on Ray's side (That's a rare occurrence), and all Greene is doing is providing Ray with fodder for his voluminous claims of victimhood.
A few atheists, myself included, have even noted on Ray's blog that Greene's acting like a dingus. Freedom of speech either applies to everyone or it doesn't mean a thing, and going hand in hand with that is the understanding that no one has the right not to be offended. That applies to Ray, me, and everyone else. Disappointingly (though somewhat predictably), Ray has refused to acknowledge that a number of atheists have "crossed the lines" to stand beside him on this matter. Rather, he claims that other atheists "have turned on [Greene]" even though he "thought he was doing the right thing". That's wonderful, especially coming from someone who devoted a lengthy blog entry to mocking the guy - An atheist can either side with Greene, thereby proving that we're a bunch of humorless pricks who can't take a joke, or we can take Ray's side and prove that we're a pack of backbiting wolves who'll savage one of our own if bad publicity strikes. What a great choice.
So that's where it stands. Greene's behaving like a thin-skinned weenie and Ray, as usual, comes across like a smiling jerk...and the world spins on.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Slow news day in Japan...
Well, it's good to know that the Japanese really do have a plan for dealing with aliens and Godzilla. Giant monsters and zombies are two subjects that have spawned more elaborate planning from myself and my friends than almost anything else, and it's good, in kind of a sad way, to know that foreign heads of government have similar concerns.
FYI, the reason there's any question at all as to whether or not the Japanese could preemptively fire upon Godzilla is the good ol' postwar MacArthur Constitution, which abolished Japan's military and replaced it with a "self-defense force". (That's why when you watch Godzilla movies all the tanks say JSDF on them.) War is, in all seriousness, unconstitutional in Japan, and the country is prohibited from taking aggressive action on the battlefield. Even Japanese forces deployed in foreign lands as part of UN peacekeeping groups can only fight to protect themselves, allied forces, civilians, and Red Cross personnel. However, this could be circumvented in the case of Godzilla by declaring him to be a "natural disaster", as Minister of Defense Shigeru Ishida explained to, I assume, a dumbstruck crowd of journalists over the weekend. If Godzilla were, to borrow a phrase, classified as an "enemy combatant", it would technically be illegal for the Japanese to attack him should he be, for example, simply hanging offshore near the nation's coastline but not actually attempting to come ashore or eat ships full of Red Cross volunteers.
There's actually been some talk in the Japanese Parliament lately about getting rid of the JSDF and replacing it with a proper army, mostly in response to concerns about North Koreas's nuclear ambitions. It remains to be seen if the Japanese have a contingency plan prepared in case Godzilla should attack the Korean Peninsula in search of radioactive fuel to power his nuclear metabolism.
FYI, the reason there's any question at all as to whether or not the Japanese could preemptively fire upon Godzilla is the good ol' postwar MacArthur Constitution, which abolished Japan's military and replaced it with a "self-defense force". (That's why when you watch Godzilla movies all the tanks say JSDF on them.) War is, in all seriousness, unconstitutional in Japan, and the country is prohibited from taking aggressive action on the battlefield. Even Japanese forces deployed in foreign lands as part of UN peacekeeping groups can only fight to protect themselves, allied forces, civilians, and Red Cross personnel. However, this could be circumvented in the case of Godzilla by declaring him to be a "natural disaster", as Minister of Defense Shigeru Ishida explained to, I assume, a dumbstruck crowd of journalists over the weekend. If Godzilla were, to borrow a phrase, classified as an "enemy combatant", it would technically be illegal for the Japanese to attack him should he be, for example, simply hanging offshore near the nation's coastline but not actually attempting to come ashore or eat ships full of Red Cross volunteers.
There's actually been some talk in the Japanese Parliament lately about getting rid of the JSDF and replacing it with a proper army, mostly in response to concerns about North Koreas's nuclear ambitions. It remains to be seen if the Japanese have a contingency plan prepared in case Godzilla should attack the Korean Peninsula in search of radioactive fuel to power his nuclear metabolism.
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