Polygamy Freak Warren Jeffs Defends Cult of Child Molesters

One man freakshow Warren Jeffs, self-proclaimed "prophet" of the separatist Fundamentalist LDS (FLDS aka "old school" Mormon) Church, has fired his lawyers and decided to defend himself and his proclivity for banging 12-year-old girls in "spiritual marriages".  Naturally, most legal experts don't think this is a good idea, considering that he can be facing up to life in prison.

However, it doesn't end there.  He apparently delivered a 55-minute sermon, not only defending plural marriage, but threatening that God would cause "sickness and death" upon those prosecuting him unless they dropped their charges and released him.  In other news, his dumb a*s is still in prison, his trial is still going on, and nobody is particularly afraid of his monster under the bed and things that go bump in the night style threats.  Of course when other fundamentalists say that god will send an earthquake, hurricane, etc to punish gay people, some still take that kind of nonsense seriously, so maybe Jeffs just isn't being grandiose and flamboyant enough.  

As far as polygamy goes, the Bible quite undeniably supported marriage to more than one woman at a time in the Old Testament.  Personally, I can't see what the attraction of having 70 wives to tell me I'm wrong would be when I already have one who is perfectly good at this.  Perhaps God thought the same thing. After all, poor Solomon reputedly had 1000 wives.  

So eternal God changed his eternal mind about multiple wives as christian dogma developed.  It is perhaps one of the few good idea that Christians had, to only have one wife, although they were far from originating the concept.  It's a lot less work, that's for sure.  I mean come on, it's not a machine, ladies.  There's only so much sauce in the squeeze bottle.  

Now this doesn't mean that people won't mess around.  They just have the sense to not get married to everyone they hop in the sack with.  Old Joseph Smith apparently lacked this sense.  He wanted to bed multiple women, but the mores of the time said that he couldn't do this without marrying them.  So he re-invented polygamy for Christians, and there have been problems ever since.  

People like Jeffs highlight just a few of the problems.  When one guy hogs all the broads then there are not enough for everyone else.  Furthermore, there is no way that you can have as dedicated a relationship, spreading your time between 70 women, as you could if you spent that time with just 1 woman.  And something else that old Jeffie hasn't thought about is that these women have needs of their own.  Even if you've got them locked down and believing that you have magic powers, they are gonna have the urge to get freaky with some other guy (or girl) when you're not around.  

Nope, sorry, 70 wives doesn't work.  It doesn't pass the sanity test.  Even players know that trying to juggle 70 different girlfriends isn't fun anymore.  Even if they are supposedly all "sister wives", there is going to be jealousy.  No wonder Jeffs looks so worn out.  It's a little known fact that he's actually only 23 and he just looks like he's in his 50's ;-)  

Naser Abdo, the Muslim Anders Brevik Wannabe

Just as the world was still reeling from the mass-murdering rampage of Anders Brevik, apparently a Muslim soldier by the name of Naser Jason Abdo, is allegedly admitting to planning another murder spree at Fort Hood.  I say "another murder spree" because there was another mass killing at Fort Hood in 2009 by a Muslim extremist, Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded dozens more .

Mr. Abdo apparently was unsatisfied with that level of carnage and wanted to take a second crack at things, including possibly using a bomb as well as guns.  Furthermore, as with Hasan, there can be no doubt that his religious beliefs played a large part in fueling his rage.  Of course they also allege that Abdo had child pornography on his computer, which exposes him to charges of hypocrisy, but then again, huge numbers of religious extremists are hypocritical and have double standards.  It doesn't appear to make them any less extremist.  

Like Hasan he believed that a Muslim soldier should not have to serve in the military when it is engaged in operations against other combatants who are also Muslim.  Well gee, christian soldiers have had to fight against other christians in almost every military conflict the US has ever had.  Why should there be a special exemption when you're a muslim?  

Naturally, logic and careful thinking are often severely lacking in the minds of religious extremists.  

Yes, Batsh*t (crazy) Brevik Is Definitely A CHRISTIAN

Whenever some unhinged fanatic, like Anders Brevik, does something appalling and indefensible, the standard reaction is for people to say "This mans is not really, truly, sincerely one of us.  He just calls himself by our label. Why this person is just using our label in a 'cultural sense' as an 'identity' and to 'appeal to a larger audience'. "  That is how some muslims attempted to deal with the inconvenient extremist Osama bin Laden, and that is how many Christians, and fring-right-wing tea-party lunatics are attempting to distance themselves from mass-murderer Anders Brevik.  However, at least an occasional honest individual in the media has the honesty to call out the angry fanatics and fringe-right wingers who populate fundamentalist christianity.  

A case in point is Stephen Prothero writing for CNN's religion blog, who points out that Brevik very certainly professed christian beliefs that went far beyond mere "cultural identity".  Brevik, for example, made a youtube video in which he talked about how he "martyrs" like him would "soon dine in the Kingdom of Heaven".   He quoted extensively from books of the Bible such as "Exodus, Samuel, Judges, Psalms, Luke, Matthew, Isaiah, Daniel, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians", and cites verses such as "God can be a Man of War if He wants to be".  

This is not all that different from right-wing Christian fanatics like the so-called "Army of God" who endorse bombing of abortion clinics and the killing of doctors who perform abortion.  They have biblical quotes all over their eponymous (look it up to figure out the url) on their website explaining how it is a-ok to kill anyone who their religion calls an "evildoer", which is everyone who is not a fanatic, bible-literalist.  

BTW, this is why it is always funny to listen to religious fanatics who claim to believe in "moral absolutes".  They love to claim that they believe in these "absolutes" and everyone else is a "squishy relativist" who thinks that morality is "situational".  Then, when they want to justify killing abortion providers and the people who work for them they say, "The bible isn't against all killing.  It's just against UNJUST killing".  Oh really, so the commandment says, "Thou shalt not kill UNJUSTLY".  Or they say, "we are just against the taking of INNOCENT life".  Again, I don't recall the commandment saying, "Thou shalt not kill INNOCENT people". See there is always a way that you can say "My kind of killing is the GOOD kind, because it advances MY agenda, but the kind of killing that other person does is BAD killing, (because it works against my agenda)."

See Batsh*t Brevik thought his kind of killing was GOOD killing, and the kind that Muslims do is BAD killing.  Anti-abortionists think that killing their opponents is GOOD killing, but anyone who might try to kill them would be BAD.  The Crusaders and Knights Templar thought they were killing according to God's will and with God's blessings when they destroyed towns, not just in Palestine, but in Europe and Asia Minor.  Saladin thought his actions against the Crusaders were justified by his religious commitments to Islam.  

The point, dear friends, is that religion is one of the easiest tools to invoke and manipulate when you want to kill someone else.  It's one of the easiest rackets of all time to use to justify just about anything.    

Mass-murdering Christian Psychopath Breivik "Possibly" Insane?!

It is being reported that the lawyer for the confessed mass-murderer Anders Breivik says that the current evidence "suggests his client is insane".  No kidding.  They apparently found quite the sharp tack to defend Mr. Breivik.  Breivik claims to be a Knight Templar, and is trying to launch a crusade of extermination against non-indigenous inhabitants of Europe.  I'm not sure at what point his lawyer noticed the crazy train had left the station.

A lot of people do not understand what the term pyschopath means because it gets misused so often.  Psychopaths are often otherwise well-functioning individuals who have none of the classic signs of mental illness, such as hallucinations or depression, but who often are extremely manipulative, good at playing false roles, have a very high opinion of themselves, enjoy taking extreme risks, and have a complete callous disregard for others.  In some ways they are similar to people with borderline personality disorders, only more pronounced.

Of course his insanity brings up the chicken and egg riddle of religion.  Is he drawn to extremist religion because he is crazy, or is he crazy because of his extremist religious viewpoints.  It's often hard to tell.  Some have said that he is not really religious and just uses that as an "identity".  However, that is true of a great many religious people, including many of the crusaders, templars, and even modern terrorists like bin Laden.

Of course they use religion as an identity.  That does not mean that we can entirely discount the influence of religion upon their minds.  Yes, they manipulate religion to suit their purposes, but so do Pat Robertson and and Tim LaHaye.  That doesn't mean that they don't believe it in any sense.  They love religion all the more because of its inherent usefulness in manipulating others.  They probably think God made it that way, and they probably think they are going "the Lord's work".

In reality their massive egos conflate God's will with their own.  This is part of the reason that religion can put one in a dangerous frame of mind.  There is nothing more grandiose than the belief that you are infallible because God is on your side.  This is a characteristic that is often also found in far right-wing ideologies, who model their love of authoritarianism upon the authoritarian nature of God and religion.

Perhaps we can finally taste the bitterness of that toxic admixture now.

Anders Breivik is Rush Limbaugh Only Younger And Less Chickensh*t

Make no mistake.  There is an epidemic of right-wing christian lunacy in the US too, but the primary difference is that right-wing blowhards in the US tend to be far too cowardly to actually act upon their idiotically ill-conceived ideologies. Not so in other parts of the world, like Norway, where right-wing fundamentalist Anders Breivik randomly murdered people with a car bomb, and targets of opportunity on an island campground called Utoya.

His calls for "pre-emptive war" and a "crusade" against muslims, despite the fact that his victims are almost exclusively non-muslim, should sound familiar in the US because they were part of the Bush Doctrine.  Right-wingers in the US were proud of pre-emptive warfare, and our disgraced former president Bush frequently used terms like Crusade, pretending that he was too dumb to know how terms like that would play in the rest of the world.  Granted, some right-wing Christians like Timothy McVeigh, who also used a fertilizer bomb to attack his own government, have acted in this country.  However, for most of them, the only thing they shoot off is their big fat mouths.

The same right-wing racists like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity who scream about immigrants, and want to launch a "war of civilizations" against Islam have given aid and comfort to people like Breivik.  They too are "Marxist hunters" like Breivik called himself.  They too advocate constant violent rhetoric, putting pictures of gunsights on the pictures of their political opponents, and speaking of "2nd Amendment remedies" and "bullets not ballots" to force society to goosestep to their authoritarian demands.  

A man like Breivik is really what Rush Limbaugh wants to be, but is too fat, stupid, and cowardly to actually be.  This is not to say that it would be a good for him to try, nor is it saying that Breivik can be considered "brave" to shoot unarmed teens and blow up bombs that kill civilians.  Instead of bravery, he had a callous disregard for his own life and the lives of others, putting the lie, yet again, to the notion that extremist Christianity is a "pro-life" movement.  

No, extremist christians worship violence.  Look at the Book of Revelation.  They worship a bloody apocalyptic vision of the end of the world where the blood will be so deep that it will reach the height of a horses bridle for 1600 stadia around Jerusalem (Rv 14:20).   

This delusional punk Breivik declared himself a Knight Templar, and apparently had written an elaborate, 1500 page treatise attempting to recruit others to purge racial impurities from Europe by 2083.  Yet this is not that different from the "scholarship" coming out of home-school raised, bible-college educated american fundamentalists who want to replace our constitution with old testament biblical law.  It too was racist and xenophobic, and wanted to impose death as the standard sentence for almost any offense.  

I would recommend that secular, non-religious people take appropriate steps to defend themselves against the Andrew Breiviks who may be living among you right here in the US.  Go ahead and get your concealed carry permits.  Get over your standard liberal hangups and recognize that a gun does not have to be dangerous, if you are smart and diligent.  It can make you safer from people like this who are increasingly on the rise in the US.  

Bachmann bach-pedals on de-gay-ification

In the wake of revelations that Michele Bachmann and her husband operated a clinic that tried to re-program homosexuals to be straight, some evangelicals claim that they have been quietly backing away from the practice for years. It must be a very quiet operation, because the average, rank-and-file evangelical certainly has not gotten the news. Huge numbers of them still believe in exactly this kind of thing and want to send their children to reprogramming clinics the moment there is a blip on the gaydar.

In fact, according to this article, counsellors at the Bachmann clinic still see it as an illness that can be treated, primarily with prayer, but it's just that they admit, at least according to secretly recorded office visits, that they are not particularly competent at dealing with it.

In the transcripts of the Time.com article, for example, the therapist laughably suggests that a person might become a homosexual by seeing another man take his shirt off at an early age. Well gosh, I think just about 100% of boys have seen at least one other boy without a shirt, and yet the overwhelming majority of these boys never turn out to be homosexuals. I hope that people are not paying good money for this kind of advice.

It's great to hear that some evangelicals, like Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler can finally admit that, "sexual attraction and a profile of someone’s sexuality is a complex of factors, some of which are certainly not chosen". However, I doubt that the Bachmann's or any other right-wing politicians will run on a clunky slogan like that. Instead they still say you can "pray away the gay".

Wife Throws Hubby's Junk In Garbage Disposal

Wow. What a pre-dick-ament. I've heard of a pecker wrecker, but come on. No, this isn't some strange religious circumcision ritual. Apparently some dude in Cali pissed off his old lady so badly that she drugged him, hacked off his manhood, and then ran it through the garbage disposal. My theory is that he left the toilet seat up one too many times. See guys, it really DOES matter.

Well, actually, they were in the process of getting a divorce, before she decided to divorce her husband from his male member. Seriously, I've heard about the wife getting half of everything, but this is ... wait for it.... re-dick-u-less.

In other news, this might be the only thing that causes redneck peckerwood republicans to support stem cell research. Perhaps Speaker of the House John Boner will propose legislation that permits stem cell research only for the purpose of replacing and restoring man-meat, should one's pecker become inadvertently bobbetted, or should I say beckered, in situations just like this.

Bachmann's "clinic" performed de-gay-ification

It's hardly surprising that the mantle of far-right religious craziness has fallen from Sarah Palin and passed to Michele Bachmann. Palin seemed to be pretty far into looney tune land with her crazy pastor who thought that he could resurrect people from the dead, and believed that Alaska would become a "refuge state" when the apocalypse came. However, ultimately Palin didn't even have enough personal leadership over her family to prevent her own daughter from getting knocked up.

Compare this to Michele Bachmann, whose "clinic" Bachmann and Associates was "curing" gay people or "ex-gays" as they call them. She's not only indoctrinating dozens of foster kids, but she's running the lives of the kids of strangers. I suppose one could regard that as a sinister step up from Palin.

Of course, it is obvious to everyone that for men to like women or women to like men is biological and hormonal. Nobody claims that it is a "choice" for men to like women, for if it was, then we would expect about half of men, on a random basis to reject women in favor of the same sex. Why then, if opposite sex attraction in straight people is acknowledged to be hormonal and biological can it not be acknowledged that same sex attraction is based upon similar hormonal and biological programming?

The reason is purely theological, though I have long said the word should be pronounced "the-illogical" (Get it ;-)? Pronounce the first 'o' in theological more like an 'i'). You can't condemn a person for making immoral choices if it is no more a choice than for straight men to like straight women. You can't condemn nature as immoral. So they have to insist that gay people are pretending to have this attraction and that it's really just 100% a choice.

They say that gayness can be controlled, but so can straightness. We could all choose to be monks, although I hear they have have lots of mainly same sex relations on the sly too. But, maybe President Bachmann will cure us all of the desire to have sex, perhaps by showing us unairbrushed centerfold pictures of herself.

If Bachmann becomes president, expect the government to be operating brainwashing camps for "ex-gays" and perhaps even "ex-straights".

Atheists Get Hollywood Movie

There aren't too many movies about atheists, an even fewer that portray them in a positive light. Hollywood is changing that today with its release of a movie called _The Ledge_, written by Matthew Chapman. The all-star cast which includes Charlie Hunnam, Liv Tyler, Patrick Wilson, Terrence Howard, and Christopher Gorham examines what makes life worth living, especially for those who have no belief in an afterlife.

Chapman, who happens to be a cousin of famed naturalist Charles Darwin, believes that this movie might be a "Brokeback Mountain" for atheists. That is, he hopes that it will help promote consciousness about the small, but growing atheist minority in the US and worldwide, which is often misunderstood and reviled by religious believers. Time will tell if it can match the lurid and forbidden appeal of Brokeback and parlay it an Academy award.

From initial reviews it sounds like it simply may not be compelling enough in its writing or subject matter to really wow people. Psychological thrillers and think pieces can't compete with fluff like _Hangover II_ . However, be that as it may, it may still get people thinking and talking, which is perhaps the most important thing as far as raising consciousness.

Pope says selfish food speculators driving up prices

Pope Benedict complained about the "selfish attitudes" of speculators, whom he accuses of driving up the prices of food, especially in the Third World. He then ate a $10,000 filet mignon off a solid gold plate, wiped his mouth with a $50,000 silk napkin, and took a dump in his platinum toilet that flushes with Dom Perignon instead of water. Ok, so the last part is slightly exaggerated to make the rather obvious point that a man who lives in a palace of priceless artworks, and who carries jewel encrusted scepters, and sits on a throne is in no position to lecture others about being greedy. Therefore, even though I agree with the Pope's sentiment, he is certainly the wrong person to be making the appeal, for this reason, and also because other church policies have made poverty even worse.

You know what I'm talking about. I'm sure that the Vatican's very next statement was to encourage the Third World to have lots more children and make sure not to use condoms or other forms of contraception which might thwart the will of the impotent almighty. The Lard will provide, right? Not so much, or the Pope wouldn't need to get off his throne and complain about how other greedy people, except for his church, seems be part of the problem.