Month: September 2022

What the Boss Likes – CNN article on rapture nonsense

CNN has a good article on “rapture anxiety“

““Rapture anxiety,” as it is often called, is recognized by some faith experts and mental health professionals as a type of religious trauma. Darren Slade, the president and CEO of the Global Center for Religious Research, has been studying religious trauma across several faiths and denominations for years.

“This is a real thing. It’s a chronic problem,” he says of rapture anxiety. “This is a new area of study, but in general, our research has revealed that religious trauma leads to an increase of anxiety, depression, paranoia and even some OCD-like behaviors: ‘I need to say this prayer of salvation so many times,’ ‘I need to confess my sins so often.’”

“Now imagine,” he continues, “You are taught that at any minute, you could be left here on Earth. What does that do to the teenager who just had premarital sex, or even simply took the Lord’s name in vain?””

No surprise here that religion can cause some awful problems.

Not So Polite Dinner Conversationn – and yet another failed apologist with more lies

Yep, I’m bored.

This is a response to an amazingly incompetent apologist, Mark Lanier, who supposedly is a “top” lawyer.  If he is, I certainly wouldn’t want him to represent me.   The poor dear has a new book, “Atheism on trial”.  Well, I guess he couldn’t use “evidence that demands a verdict”.  Here are excerpts from a podcast transcript from here. 

This is the lawyer trying to excuse why his religion fails.

“Among those factors that I identify is the failure of Christians to be authentic, authentic in their walk, and authentic in the way they treat other people. I think Christians tend to fall easily into traps of making it about us and them, of trying to impose Christian morality upon the world. And in a sense, or at least the nation, confusing the kingdom of God with the kingdom of men. And thinking that the kingdom of God is is equal to things that are world political systems. I think that’s a real danger, because I think it causes people to want to distance themselves from what they think is not an authentic faith. I think that’s just one factor. I think another factor is Christians have been, with the best of intentions, have have misread so much of Scripture and read it out of context that it’s made a lot of people think they have to make a choice between faith and science, as if they’re opposite ends of a teeter totter. And people don’t understand that the true Christian view is that science is real. It’s legitimate. It is a tool that God gave us to combat the horrors of this fallen world. So, we can learn the science of fertilization, to use fertilizers to be able to grow more crops so we can feed more people and reduce hunger. There’s the science of medicine, where we’re able to treat disease more readily. And all of these consequences of sin, that burden society that destroy lives and families, we have tools to combat those. And those tools include science. And so, I think the failure of Christians to, to fairly assess scripture has set a lot of people thinking they have a choice between science or God. And they don’t understand that, that God is the God of science.”

I do love when Christians insist that they are the only TrueChristians(tm), and have no evidence for that at all.   It’s even better when they try to lie about the sciences, sicne those sciences show that their bible is an incompetent set of myths written by humans. 

hmm, and this god evidently said “screw you” to anyone born before it got around to supposedly “giving” human such things.   His god is quite an idiot and it’s rather quaint to see christians trying to steal the honor and hard work of humans for their imaginary god.  Alas, science shows that the myths of the bible are utter nonsense.

Then we get the attempts to appeal to emotions as evidence for this god. 

“Why do we know there are black holes? Why do we know there are subatomic particles, not just the proof of the physical aspects, but the proof of the non-physical aspects, you know, love, honor, dignity, justice, fairness, these types of things need to be measured as well. And the arguments for these things need to be put into the scales as well. And when you do, frankly, I find atheism fails radically in that arena of proof.”

Well, considering that this god’s supposed actions, we can happily point out that it has nothing to do with justice or fairness.  All of these things are from the brain, and gee, no god needed.  We know that there are laws of physics and magic doesn’t happen, so we know that there are black holes, sub atomic particles, etc by evidence.  We know that people have love, honor, etc, because we have them.   Funny how the same doesn’t hold for this god’s existence. 

Finally, “Yeah, one of the biggest failures in the realm of proof, to me is atheism cannot set up a value system that’s objective.”

Yup, that good ol’, always failing argument from morality. 

hmmm, funny how Christianity hasn’t  set up an objective value system either.  Christians can’t agree on what morals their god wants, nor can convince each other of that, having no evidence for this god at all.   You all make up a god that has the morals you want, in your image.  Add this to the fact that many, if not all, christians excuse their god for doign things that they would, hopefully, be horrified if a human did the same.   This makes christian morality entirely subject to who or what someone is, not the objective morality of an action.  

“Now, we’re told that, but if atheism is true, and there is no God, then there is absolutely no basis for believing that some person is not genetically different than another,”

whut?  Humans are genetically different from each other; science has demonstrated that.  Here, poor lawyer tries to claim that atheism should lead to eugenics.  Alas, since he’s an atheist too, one wonder how that works. 

“And so if there’s no God to say, everybody is created equally and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, then why should there be equal rights? When people are not equal?”

God never said that. It’s not in the bible.  Equality between humans never shows up, despite the claims of Christians.  No one is ever equal to a Christian, the supposed “chosen” people.  This god treats no one equally.

“. But he said, you know, we like to pretend that there is subjective morality, we atheists. But wink, wink, nod, nod. We know there’s not. But you can’t go telling everybody that because the solution to it is nihilism.  Or it’s, you know, feast for yourself, otherwise, it’s the fittest that should be surviving.”

It’s also great to see him also lie about how atheists must be nihilists.   Alas, for him, we don’t have to be what a demonstrated liar says.  Funny how he can’t give a name for this supposed “atheist”.  He also demonstrates the usual ignorance of evolutionary theory.  Tsk. 

Lanier fails in his “trial” of atheism. No surprise there at all. Apologetics are only for gullible and fearful christians.

Not So Polite Conversation – the old saw that atheists have bad relationships with their parents

Always fun to see Christian liars like Stephen Bernard come out with armchair psychology and fail as usual.
Here’s what he claims:

“Before I was ever remotely interested in anything religious I noticed something about those I engaged with in the local pubs and clubs that confessed to being atheist. Most of them being atheist or agnostic were either of a wealthy privately educated background or had no father at all.”

No evidence for this, but the typical false claims.

“The former usually had poor relationships with their workaholic fathers who were never around while the latter never knew them. I noticed this even in working class families where the father was either abusive or the sons parents were divorced.”

and yet more baseless claims. I have a great relationship with my dad. Again, it seems that christians are desperate to invent any way they can to cast aspersions on atheists and try to gin up fear to try to dissuade their fellow theists from considering the facts.

“Either way a rupture in the family unit, abusive or absent father is a very common sight to see in atheistic communities. They’re acutely aware of this themselves so when I got a group of them together I asked them how their relationship with their father was going. They all became verbally abusive and refused to answer the question.”

hmm, gee, more lies from a theist voiced and the poor dear is upset that people get disgusted with him. And do tell how a theist got a group of “them” together. I also enjoy knowing that divorce equal or worse in christian families. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/marital-status/divorcedseparated/

https://www.barna.com/research/new-marriage-and-divorce-statistics-released/

and well, we all know how prevalent child abuse is in religious organizations, especially Stephen’s Roman Catholic church. There is also a book that looks quite interesting “Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment” by Janet Heimlich.

page 27 of Heimlich’s book

Add this plus the common Christain idea of physical punishment for children, and Stephen’s claims seem quite unsupported.

Here is an interesting bit from a NIH paper that shows that the Christian need to keep claiming this nonsense is based on little but weakly supported claims that are contradicted.

“Although religiosity seems to have beneficial effects for adjustment in child maltreatment survivors, prior research has reported that individuals experiencing child maltreatment are less likely to practice religion. Such findings may be explained by the correspondence hypothesis (Granqvist & Dickie, 2005), which proposes that individuals who have experienced secure vs. insecure childhood attachments have established the foundations on which a corresponding relationship with God could be built. According to this view, maltreated individuals, who are more likely to have insecure attachment relationships with their primary attachment figures, are less likely to view God as loving and caring compared to nonmaltreated individuals. In contrast, the compensation hypothesis (Granqvist & Dickie, 2005) predicts that individuals with insecure childhood attachment may be more likely to seek God for compensatory attachment relationships. Consistent with the correspondence hypothesis, empirical studies have reported negative effects of child maltreatment on religiosity demonstrating that survivors of abuse tend to have more negative views on God (e.g., Finkelhor, Hotaling, Lewis, & Smith, 1989; Kennedy & Drebing, 2002). In particular, Bierman (2005) examined the effects of physical and emotional abuse on religiosity among adults and found that abuse perpetrated by fathers during childhood was related to low levels of religiosity. It is plausible that the image of God as a father led survivors of abusive fathers to distance themselves from religion. However, there is also evidence that maltreated and nonmaltreated children did not differ in their view of God as kind and close, although maltreated children perceived their parents as less kind and more wrathful than did nonmaltreated children (Johnson & Eastburg, 1992). Work is needed to understand the unique role of religiosity in child maltreatment survivors.” Religiosity and Interpersonal Problems Explain Individual Differences in Self Esteem among Young Adults with Child Maltreatment ExperiencesJonathan C. Waldron,a,* Angela Scarpa,b and Jungmeen Kim-Spoonc

“They knew the reason for my question. It branded their conscience like a red hot iron. This isn’t a fine rule for every atheist, but usually the majority have had some sort of troubled upbringing in a fractured family.”

yep, we know why you claim such lies, dear, to do no more than try to cast aspersions and gin up fear for becoming an atheist. No iron was there, only Stephen’s delusion.

“What is the correlation between absentee father and atheism? I think a lot of it has to do with the idea of calling God, “Father”. When you’ve had a terrible relationship with your father or never had one around, there’s an anger present there that if someone should even mentions the word “Father” a strong aversion to the concept soon follows.”

funny how there is no “correlation” at all. Stephen has no evidence for his false claims at all.

“It’s the same with children from a divorced family. Any mention of a “Holy Family” referring to Jesus, Mary and Joseph tickles a part of their brain that makes them go wild. I’ve noticed this in Catholic converts to Protestantism by women. If you dig a little deeper you’ll often find such female converts have had a bad relationship with their mother. In Catholicism we refer to Mary as our Mother and Protestantism removes such a requirement from any convert having to do so.”

Here’s a slightly new twist, a claim that us gals have a bad relationship with their mothers. Alas, Stephen simply lies again. Happily, me and spouse also had/have good relationships with our mothers.

“In the end what Atheists crave is the very thing they have a strong aversion for, a loving earthly and heavenly family with God as their father. They don’t know it. . . well. . . maybe some do. . . but they’ll never admit that is what they subconsciously desire because that would wound their pride and force them to come out of hiding and admit God exists.”

ROFL, poor Stephen, trying to convince himself that he’s so special, and that us atheists “really” do want what he thinks he has. We don’t.

He’ll of course try to claim he wasn’t “really” talking about all atheists as a way to dodge his own false claims.

No So Polite Conversation – a “new” failed theodicy

I’ve found a supposedly new and typically bad theodicy. This is “participation theodicy” by John Buck. I’ve snagged a copy of it here.

the abstract: “

Why does God allow gratuitous suffering to occur?

In this paper, the author puts forward a variation on the greater good theodicy, which rather than suggesting that every evil which occurs brings about some greater-good, the paper instead argues that for any great world God could have created by himself, God’s generosity would instead motivate him to allow creatures to participate in the bringing about of that great world. This scenario would require God to initially create a world that was ‘less-than as great as it could be’ (opening up the possibility for evils to occur), so that the creatures that would inhabit said world could causally contribute towards its achieving of greatness. Such a world would feature the goods of participation that would be lacking in a world God were to create by himself.”

So, it boils down to nothing new, but the old christian idea that it’s okay to hurt people as long as some are “taught” by that harm. I’m happy I’m not so selfish as so many christian.

Is God an Abuser?

a good post about how gods, especially the Christian god, has all of the marks of any abusive partner or parent.

“

The moral character of the Christian God is the question which eventually led me away from Christianity. After a decade of non-belief, I still can’t help but look back to the time when I was such a staunch Christian and ponder the effects it had on me, and the effects it is still having on billions of people around the world. Recently, I’ve become more aware of abusive relationships and the tactics abusers use on their victims, and I thought I’d take a look at the behavior of the Christian God as described in the Bible and by Christians themselves, as well as general observations about the world, to see if God’s relationship with humanity, and especially with His believers, is a healthy one.

For the purposes of this analysis, I’ll be going through this article on WebMD for how to recognize if you’re in an abusive relationship. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes in this blog post will be quoting this WebMD article. Before we get into the list of things to watch out for, let’s first define what an abusive relationship is. According to WebMD:

An abusive relationship will involve one party using their power over the other party to prevent them from doing anything except what the abusive person wants.

So, if the Christian God is using His power to prevent people from doing anything except what He wants, the relationship is abusive. Anyone who has read much of the Bible may already be noticing a red flag here, as so much of it revolves around obedience to God. Still, let’s hold off our judgment for now. Let’s see how God stacks up against this list of warning signs that your partner might be abusive.

Warning Sign 1: Communication Monitoring”

https://badventistblog.wordpress.com/2022/09/04/is-god-an-abuse

what the boss *loves* – when a trumpee website is its own best satire

Oh dear, there is a website called “The Conservateur” which is trying so very hard to lie about the vain not very bright trumpee women. One doesn’t even have to change the writing to make it utter satire (which is, yep, protected by US law). Now, I know, you’ll say, “Vel, this has to be a spoof site, but dear reader, it is not.

Let’s take a look at some of the photos from there:

Y’know because everyone who rides a horse wants to get horse sweat on their evening gown.

Poor Lara, who is claimed to have asked for horse at every birthday, but never actual rode it to know how stupid this picture looks to real horse women and men.

Then we get quotes like this “On frequent Fox News appearances and her weekly podcast, The Right View, Lara readily and articulately discusses the pressing issues confronting America. Before media hits, she “asks God to use her as a vessel.””

Hmm, while dressing exactly like this god supposedly says not to. Hmmm. I do love the writing here, nothing like pure sycophancy on the hoof.

I think it’s hilarious that either this dress will take up half a ballroom wrapping unsuspecting rivals like a spider, or poor Lara was convinced that it was “dramatic”.

Oh dears, no one is paying attention to Lara. Probably because she is just like orange moron senior, having no more taste than he does.

oh look , daisy dukes! (for those of you overseas, this is a reference to the Dukes of Hazzard (ridiculous redneck nonsense) TV show from the 80s where the females were generally in cutoff jeans shorts and midriff baring tops.

Then we can go to the pearl clutching of how Catholics are just be ever so abused. “Across the West, with secularization at an all-time high, there is increasing ostracization of religious people. Over the last few years, religious bigotry has escalated in Europe with the burning of Catholic churches and the terrifying return of rampant anti-Semitism.”

hmm, you mean anticatholicism like this lovely Jack Chick tract that “good conservative Christians” aka evangelicals still pass around?

Catholics aren’t very smart to learn who they are bedfellows with.

And then as lovely example of cultists showing that they are liars, we get this

“So my question to you is, what will it take for you to repeat Jesus’s words, “as You will?” I encourage you to willingly surrender to your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and then take up your cross and follow Him to Heaven. 

All to Jesus I surrender all. “

when gee, this is all about high couture and “culture”. Funny how they seem to forget the whole give up *everything* and follow me. They rely on “Hey, you aren’t asking that where I can hear it, so evidently you don’t want me to.” Wonderfully convenient, eh?

It’s hard to find a single page on this unintentionally hilarious website to that one can’t find some utterly unaware ignorant conservative demonstrating just how idiotic they can be.

“Astrology is not the only trend that attempts to replace or reinvent religion. Practices such as manifestation, witchcraft, voodoo magic, and tarot card reading are becoming popular among young women and teenage girls. Teen Vogue currently has an entire section dedicated to witchcraft, and many variations of tarot cards have flooded the market. Several of my friends and sorority sisters have gone out and bought a deck, (noticeably all secular). It’s clear that people who’ve rejected religion are desperate for spirituality and are looking everywhere but the church.”

yah mean, like what the sainted Reagans believed in?



and “From the Dallas Cowboys cheerleading squad to Dolly Parton to Miss USA, there are few things more American than big hair. While there’s nothing better than a salon blow-dry, you don’t have to go to the Dry Bar to get that perfect balmy blow-out. As someone who has dealt with puffy and thick hair my whole life, I have learned to embrace and style my big hair, and I’ve picked up a few tricks along the way! Today, I have you covered on my favorite tips for achieving a little more bounce and volume. I’m giving you the rundown of my at-home hair routine, products, and hot tools to help you style that perfect all-American hair.”

and yep, article accompanied by a 80s pic of a Dallas Cowboy (american football team) cheerleader.

It just can’t get any more ridiculous.

Oh dear, conservatives thanks for being such complete twits.