Ex Cathedra

Tony Dungy is a total Jesus head. Norv Turner can take it or leave it. Result, as we all know, Chargers: 28, Colts:24.

But at long last we have positive proof. Dungy said in a previously unpublished interview, “Jesus really fucked us over . It’s probably the curse he placed on the Irsay family for leaving Baltimore.”

Ah, if only.
But nobody minds that Jesus gets the thanks but never the blame  because Jesus isn’t real and everybody knows it.

The White House and the right-wing blogosphere have an explanation for Scott McClellan’s book making the news: ‘lib-ruhl media bias.”

Hey, keep those new ideas coming, guys.

As Spring turns into Summer  there’s a real Canary or two who may sing, and  they’re arguably not covered by executive privilege. Keep a happy thought.

I’m taking time from my snoozing meditations for this important news item:  the Spongebob Squarepants Musical Rectal Thermometer

OK, were the title and subject  of this piece too disgusting even for me?

Guess we know now.

Btw the comments on that article were priceless.

Here’s one more, sort of relevant from Paul at going.com titled “You think you hate your job?:

On your way home from work, stop at your pharmacy and go to the thermometer section and purchase a rectal thermometer made by Johnson &Johnson. Open the package and remove the thermometer. Take out the literature from the box and read it carefully. You will notice that in small print there is a statement:

“Every Rectal Thermometer made by Johnson &Johnson is personally tested”.

If you’re at work and start searching for “musical rectal thermometer,” Ex Cathedra will not be responsible for the consequences.

Sure, the “100 more years of war” guy has thrown Hagee and Parsley under the bus, but Joe Lieberman — apparently forgetting that a serious number of conservative voters, in the privacy of the voting booth, voted against Gore because he had a “Jewboy” for a running mate — is still kissing up to Hagee, attending his conclave or whatever you call it in the hope that he’ll get tapped by the exploding senator to be his choice for veep.

Then you’d have two Republicans on the ticket who’d do anything for love.

Hey, conservatives, you’ve still got Bob Barr from the Libertarian Party. Sure, he has been talking seriously about Americans’ constitutional rights, which probably made Cheney tap his phone, but the angry old white guy crowd will forgive that when they remember he was a Clinton impeachment manager.

Enjoy your choices, guys.

Greta Christina has an article about what a perfect world would look like.

Do atheists want to sit around bitching and moaning forever, throwing the occasional snark bomb at fundies, or do we want to accomplish something? Given that the current state of affairs, the Corporate States of Jesusland, is awful, what would a better country and world look like?

Greta has some pretty good answers.

Perfect world 1 is that religion simply fades away and disappears. Perfect world 2 is that religions and religious people become tolerant and learn to leave other people the hell alone. For some pretty good reasons, she thinks perfect world 2 is unlikely.

Me too.

I was just reading a history of agnosticism by Bernard Lightman. I’m beginning to understand that liberal religion (a religion that doesn’t want to convert you or kill you) simply doesn’t hold up. Unless you reduce your favorite god to just one more creature in the world, then you can’t know anything about that god by observation and reason; and the god you get from pure reason is so abstract, it barely makes it all the way up to deism, much less theism . The best way, perhaps the only way to know anything about gods (unless you’re a Roman Catholic and are satisfied with Pius X’s encyclical which looks suspiciously like “because I said so”) is through revelation. Since revelation isn’t susceptible to reason, or it hasn’t been so far, revelation is either wholly true or wholly false. Fundamentalism, though I admire neither its exegetical methods nor its practice as a religion, has integrity in that one thing: revelation is either wholly true or wholly false. Cherry picking ends up with a bucket full of cherries, plums, peaches, and dog turds. What’s more, it’s never been done twice with the same results.

If you can show me a god that is susceptible to being known about in the ordinary way that’s an actual god or a god that can be known through pure reason that can actually do something and can exist outside the human mind or the “noumenal world,” (wherever the hell that is), I’ll be pleased to reconsider. But for now, put me down for “wholly false.” The disconnect between dealing with things in the real world and dealing with revealed things is just too jarring. Maybe trying to reconcile the two into one way of looking at the world is too hard.

So, just as Greta said, for different reasons, the halfway house of liberal religion is too hard to build. And as people read their “inerrant” bibles and conclude “this is stupid,” the easiest place to go — perhaps the only posssible place to go — is all the way out.

There are bad things about the stroke I’ve had, like having the attention of a fruitfly when my son plays talk shows and Comedy Central on the TV and like my stupid left hand being terrible at typing. But there’s one good thing. Maybe it’s the brain damage, and maybe it’s being “somewhat retired.” I have the most vivid dreams now, and I remember them after I wake up. Maybe having to get on an alarm clock driven schedule will fix that, but I’m not eager to lose that part of my life again.

This dream has hung around long enough for me to speculate on what caused it. I’ve been getting calls from headhunters, sometimes about very attractive jobs. I always tell them very nicely that I won’t be able to accept jobs having to do with weapon systems, and when they ask — they always ask — I say it’s for religious reasons. Can atheists have religious reasons? Maybe I’m not telling the precise truth. Well, I’m not inflating my résumé. I don’t do that: Even if I did, I’m awful at lying, so I’d be busted before I opened my backpack. But I don’t much care if a technical missstatement results in my not getting a job I’ll probably hate.

Oh yeah, the dream. Training devices usually come in bunches: full flight sim, cockpit procedures trainer, panel trainers that demostrate the functionality of various aircraft systems in classrooms, maintenance trainers) The training device I was shaking down was a Moral Readiness Trainer. Trainees would enter the cockpit and be tested on their moral readiness to assume duties in the military.

There’s a pun there: there’s a part of most simulators’ code and accompanying procedures called morning readiness. It’s a sanity check on your system so the customer doesn’t try to train flight crew on a broken simulator I once wrote the code for morning readiness for a system that went into space and was subject to radiation that could screw up the contents of RAM and the contents of the flash drives where the software was stored. Kind of an interesting problem, but it was accepted and went into space. Unfortunately the system was installed in the Spektr module of Mir, which ran into an accident with a provisioning rocket, so my software was briefly in space. I suspect the vacuum let the magic smoke out of some of the parts. Eventually my system crashed, into the ocean.

So here we were in the Moral Readiness Trainer cockpit and we were under heavy fire and shells were bursting everywhere So some of my students got up and rescued some people and took them to the aid station. It wasn’t on my lesson plan. It doesn’t need to be.

There were motive, means, and opportunity to strike back at the enemy, I told my trainees that placing their own lives at risk to save others was fine, but, while they could make up their own minds about this, I personally wouldn’t recommend using violence.I told my students that I wouldn’t use my rank to force my decision on them, but they should make up their own minds. And if they’d had a religious upbringing that stressed obedience, they might have some trouble with that, but they should figure out what’s right and wrong by themselves and do the best they could.

These trainees didn’t look up at me with doe-eyed reverence. I wasn’t a hero, not even in my own dream. I looked up to them. They were like every young military man or woman I’d ever met: bright, eager to serve their country, and eager to learn how to fulfill their mission.

O thus be it ever when free people shall stand

Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.

Let’s remember them and the real people in our armed services this Memorial Day and hope they all make the right choices and come back safe and well.

Got ‘em crossed? Start crossing them now for May 25.

7 Minutes of Terror from NASA JPL.

h/t/ GMSV

Sara Whitman, as she often does, wrote an article that’s both homely and profound about a robin who keeps bashing his head into her window, trying to beat up his own reflection. One of these days our Vast Readership will go straight to Sara’s blog and skip this one.

Sara notes that the robin keeps on bashing his head into the window and has done so for several days, fighting his imaginary rival, despite the fact that it doesn’t work and he could just as easily be going after the robin babes he’s trying and failing to impress. And she applies that observation to the Bush foreign policy which, if he is elected, McCain is all but certain to continue. Well, not exactly continue: Bush is stupid, rigid, in the pockets of the powerful, and bigoted; McCain is all of that and very likely crazy as well.

Bill Perdue wisely remarked on The Bilerico Project, where Sara reposted her article, that the robin reminds him of people who can’t give up checking the “D” box on their ballots despite the constant disappointment the Democrats have given us. He warns against disappointment and maybe worse if Obama wins this fall. His caution is well justified: people have been expecting an awful lot of Obama

I remarked, perhaps not so wisely, with something like his:

I know perfectly well who signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law in 1996.

We’ve never in my memory been given a choice between one candidate who will unfailingly actualize all our hopes and dreams and another candidate who is guaranteed to give free rein to all our enemies and actualize all our nightmares.

Our only choices have ever been between “better” and “worse.”

Smart voters sometimes play the odds. Here in the southern states, “D” used to stand for racism and aristocracy. Now, it stands for less racism and less surrender of rights and agency to the most powerful. That’s the best choice we’re given. So we settle for voting for less racism and less surrender rather than checking the “R” box and voting (most of the time) for more racism and more aristocracy.

Just because you can only see “better” and “worse” on the ballot doesn’t mean “worst” isn’t there. It’s in every blank square. Opting out is surrender to the worst.

And, if we’ve learned nothing from the reign of George W. Bush, we’ve learned this: we have to keep our eyes on the bastards, even the lesser bastards like Pelosi and Reid.

Did somebody think the price of liberty was occasional vigilence?

Hillary vows to fight on, and I wish I’d penned this observation myself. (It comes from a submission to the NYTimes letters to the editor and I am stealing it because I liked it so much.)

As I watch Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s continuing campaign for her party’s nomination, I see a self-focused politician who, despite the reality of the situation, continues to stubbornly pour money that the campaign doesn’t have into a battle that it can’t win. And over these last several years, I have learned that these are the specific qualities that I do not want in our nation’s next president.

Remember the last time we talked about bad movie expert and right-wing Christian Michael Medved? He was telling us slavery wasn’t all that bad.

Now he’s outdone himself. The reason Americans are so cool is that
our genes are better. Americans are descended from risk takers who have the spunk to make a dangerous voyage and tame the wilderness.

Well, except for Thuh Nigruh.

Paul Lamb has a brilliant comment:

So does this mean all of those “energetic” and “agressive” folks from south of the Rio Grande who are vigorously choosing to come here as well have his stamp of approval?

Sorry, gang, I call Poe’s Law on Medved. He’s a brilliant parodist who’s been putting us all on.