Things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City XX

29 06 2008

Machine Gun Keyboard‘s take on World Youth Day

The week in fundie . . .

  1. Three years after Campus Crusade for Christ spammed the incoming mail of Australian school principals with the creationist propaganda DVD The Privileged Planet, Focus on the Family is doing the same in New Zealand. But whereas the then Australian Education Minister Brendan Nelson welcomed the prospect of creationism being taught in Australian schools “if that is the wish of parents,” the New Zealand Education ministry maintains “the theory of evolution underpins the science curriculum and schools have a responsibility to teach theories that are subject to accepted scientific scrutiny.” According to the NZ Christian newspaper Weekly Challenge, The Discovery Institute’s Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez (authors of The Privileged Planet) will be conducting a speaking tour of that country in October and November to, as the paper puts it, “strengthen our belief in an intelligent and amazing Designer.” Not that Intelligent Design has anything to do with religion, you understand. (Via Pharyngula)
  2. In Ghana, 34-year-old Yussif Abdullarahman killed one of his wives by hitting her on the head with a blunt object and pouring acid over her body because, as he claimed, “she was a witch.” (Happy 98.9 FM)
  3. In the Indian state of Jharkand, three members of a family were beaten to death with bamboo sticks and iron rods after being accused of practising witchcraft. According to Thaiindian News, “over 700 people, mostly women, have been killed over the past few years in Jharkhand after being branded as witches.”
  4. The Anti-Christ will be a German Jew, according to UK Pentecostalist sect RedSky Ministries. Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories : Democracy, Education, ethics, Human rights, Magical Thinking, Morons, proto-fascism, Religion, science

Is there really much difference between religion and insanity?

31 05 2008

Or at least, between religion and woo-woo?

A couple of weeks ago I blogged on Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster and the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. He was calling for the BBC to be biased in favour of Christianity and to give unopposed air time to Christian voices, accusing secularists of being “Christophobic” and wishing to “close off every voice and contribution other than their own.” He later claimed that reason “leads to terror and oppression.”

This post isn’t about O’Connor. This is about his personal exorcist, Father Jeremy Davies . . . though I suppose, given O’Connor’s stance on reason, it makes sense that he would have a “personal exorcist.” Davies has joined the flea circus of apologist tomes published as a backlash against the “new atheists” with a new book, Exorcism: Understanding Exorcism in Scripture and Practice, in which (according to the National Secular Society) he maintains that

the “spirits inspiring atheism” were those who “hate God.” [. . .] Father Davies writes that Satan has blinded secular humanists from seeing the “dehumanising effects of contraception and abortion and IVF (in vitro fertilisation), of homosexual ‘marriages,’ of human cloning and the vivisection of human embryos in scientific research.

“The result, he said, was that Europe was drifting into a dangerous state of apostasy whereby “only (through) a genuine personal decision for Christ and the church can someone separate himself from it.”

Davies also blames atheism for “perversions” such as homosexuality and extra-marital sex. He condemns atheism, blasphemy, attacks on the Church and “resisting God’s grace” as “rebellions against God”; but, just to prove that he doesn’t go in for that woo-woo nonsense, he also warns against yoga and massages, which the former doctor regards as equally demonic as seances, astrology and acupuncture. Fortune-tellers and mediums are bad, he claims, because attempts to contact the spirits of the dead are “direct invitations to the devil which he readily accepts.”

As the good Father and official exorcist in the Diocese of Westminster reminds us, “Sanity depends on our relationship to reality.” Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Atheism, Magical Thinking, Morons, Muelhenberg alumni, Religion

Things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City VIII

15 02 2008

The week in fundie . . .

  1. In that jewel of civilisation known as Saudi Arabia, an illiterate woman who had a fingerprint-signed confession (which she couldn’t read) beaten out of her, has been sentenced to death by beheading. For witchcraft. (via Pharyngula)
  2. In Tonga, an elderly man accused of practising witchcraft has been hacked to death with bush knives. (News24)
  3. In KwaZulu-Natal, a seven-year-old boy was beheaded and his testicles removed, in what police suspect is a “muti killing” (where body parts are extracted for medicinal/witchcraft purposes). (News24)
  4. The Catholic Church in Poland is planning the construction of an “exorcism center,” after priests at the Institute for Studies on the Family “realized they needed an exorcist on staff after they encountered an increase in people suffering from evil.” (Sort of a “theo-epidemiology,” if you will. The article neglects to describe how exactly “evil” is measured.) (Catholic News Agency)
  5. In Rwanda, an 84-year-old Hutu man baptised himself as a Christian after a Hutu pastor refused to lay hands on him, accusing the man of betraying his tribe because of the role he played protecting Tutsis during the 1994 genocide. (via Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion) Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories : Human rights, Magical Thinking, Morons, Religion


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