I’m a slave 4 U

How the Bible endorses slavery, straight from the horse’s mouth (well, a horse’s mouth):

I was at a pastor’s conference in N.C. recently, and heard someone say it’s hard to refer to slavery, we have such history, how do I deal with that? I told him that the Bible doesn’t commend slavery, nor condemn it. It simply borrows the metaphor. The Bible doesn’t damn the institution of slavery, but it says masters should treat the slaves right. For some it was good especially with a benevolent master. Jesus didn’t come to abolish slavery, because if He did, He failed. He simply borrowed the metaphor because it’s so perfect! In fact, when the gospel began to move out into the world, the apostles understood it. In Acts 2:18, God is referring to His people as slaves. In Acts 4:29, when persecuted, they said, “Grant that your slaves.” They lived in a world of slaves, and understood it very well. That pastor was concerned about 5 generations ago, but these folks in the NT understood about it in the immediate generation. A slave was like a tool, you could kill your slave if you wanted to! To say that this crucified man is asking you to become his slave is beyond absurdity. Everyone who is free wanted to stay free; most slaves wanted to be free.

From a sermon by Reformed Evangelical minister John MacArthur, via the modestly-titled Christian blog The Objective Truth. MacArthur takes issue with the notion of a “personal relationship” with Jesus, arguing that the dynamic should be interpreted as that between a master and slave. Paging Dr. Dennett:

A more welcoming stance towards gays and lesbians . . . or teh Jesus gets it.

Via John Morales, in the comments at Pharyngula:

As John remarks, this YouTube may not last, but given the hysterical overreaction to PZ Myer’s post on “Frackin’ Crackers,” I think we can expect a lot more of these.

On the subject of “Al Queerda,” two WYD developments: one encouraging, the other disappointing, if not unexpected.

First, the disappointing.

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

Before we begin . . . kudos to the Federal Court for allowing sanity to prevail by striking down New South Wales’ special World Youth Day “anti-annoyance” laws.

Now, onto the week in fundie . . ,

Dillahunty FTW!

1. Kicking the homeless out of Sydney during the Roman Catholic Church’s World Youth Day: it’s What Jesus Would Do. (ABC News Online)
2. In the US, a Pakistani man has been charged with murdering his daughter because she wanted to end her arranged marriage. (Thaindian News)
3. In Jordan, a 16-year-old boy stabbed his older sister 10 times in the heart because she “disappeared from home for a month with her boyfriend.” (The Times of India)
4. The London Metropolitan University has “expressed regret at any unhappiness” caused to China as a result of its having awarded an honorary PhD to the Dalai Lama. (Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion)
5. Ugandan Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi, a participant in Australian Archbishop Peter Jensen’s anti-gay Global Anglican Future Conference, says he fears being killed by gays when he is “in countries which have supporters of homosexuals.” (via Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion)
6. In Italy, a man has been awarded damages after he was told to retake a driving test because of his homoseuxality. (via Fundies Say the Darndest Things.

We are all wafer-desecraters now

A Florida student receives death threats for attempting to smuggle a communion wafer out of a Mass, after being wrestled for it by a church leader. Other church figures describe the student’s actions as a “hate crime,” curiously neglecting to apply this description to the aforementioned death threats. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights campaigns for the student’s expulsion, but also remains curiously silent on the matter of the death threats.

Blogging on the transparent stupidity of this situation, PZ Myers makes the following suggestion:

Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address.

This is, apparently, all it takes for Myers himself to become the subject of death threats, as well as a campaign to get him disciplined by his employer the University of Minnesota orchestrated by the very same Catholic “civil rights” organisation mentioned above that clearly values discs of bread over human life.

My ire at this breathtaking display of idiocy is not directed at Catholics in general. I appreciate that many Catholics are sane and rational people who are blessed with a sense of proportion and are not going to get their panties in a twist over the prospect of host-desecration. Those many Catholics should not be tainted with the sociopathy of that subset of Catholics who (i) are unable to comprehend that respecting the rights of individuals to believe what they want to believe does not mean that the beliefs themselves must be respected, and (ii) want to harm (or desire for harm to be brought upon) those who mock or question the ideas they cherish.

I guess I just don’t see why wafer rights should outweigh human rights.

See also: Friendly Atheist and Richard Dawkins.

Quote of the Week: Christopher Hitchens on Jesse Helms

It seemed somehow profane that Sen. Jesse Helms should have managed to depart this life on the 232nd anniversary of the declaration of American independence. To die on the Fourth of July, one can perhaps be forgiven for feeling, is or ought to be a privilege reserved for men of the stamp of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom expired on that day in 1826, 50 years after the promulgation of the declaration. One doesn’t want the occasion sullied by the obsequies for a senile racist buffoon. (Slate)

Boo-ya!

World Truth Day for Pell and Hickey

By now you’ll be aware of Cardinal George Pell having been caught lying misrepresenting the truth about his knowledge of sex abuse within the priesthood. Regular visitors to this blog will also recall the sex abuse scandal in WA involving the leadership of the Catholic Charismatic Bethel Covenant Community, and of the Church’s endeavours (as with the Terence Goodall case) to wash its hands of the affair, though the incidents have hitherto not received much national media attention. You’ll remember that Barry Hickey, the Archbishop of Perth who is aligned politically with Pell and has in the past engaged in identical antidemocratic ad baculums against Catholic parliamentarians, told the West Australian newspaper in May that the Church had received no complaints about sexual misconduct at Bethel before 2007, a claim denied by ex-Bethel members.

The Archbishop was lying. The West Australian has secured a copy of a report, outlining complaints about sexual misconduct perpetrated by leaders of the Bethel Community, that was handed to the Archbishop in August 2000.

Substantiate, Kevin

The Prime Minister says of Pope Benedict:

All of Australia, [. . .] I believe, should treat him with respect.

Why?

Dispatches from the Department of the Bleeding Obvious

The badly decomposed body of an American actress was discovered in a Sydney flat in 2006. Here’s how Ninemsn reports on the inquest:

Ms Germain’s dress was lifted above her shoulders and a clothes peg was attached to her genitals.Towels, cushions, a foot spa and a construction hat covered her body, obscuring all but her right arm.

An electrical cord was wrapped around her neck and a toaster had been strung from the shower rail.

A knife and a razor blade were discovered near her body and lipstick was smeared throughout the bathroom and on Ms Germain.

“There did not appear to be any knife-inflicted injuries at the time of post-mortem,” Sgt Beecroft said.

While the circumstances were clearly suspicious, two autopsies had been unable to determine a cause of death, she said. [Emphasis added]

Sgt. Beecroft, I dub thee . . .

The conga-line-of-suckholes’ long march through Australian history

It’s frightening to consider what the US has been capable of in the name of “national security.” What’s even more scary is what an Australian government once considered acquiescing to in the name of the Australia-US alliance:

Defence files have revealed the United States military was planning to test deadly nerve gas on Australian troops in a far north Queensland rainforest in the 1960s.

Australian Defence Department files obtained by Channel Nine show the US was planning to test Sarin and VX nerve gas on up to 200 Australian combat troops by aerial bombing areas around Lockhart River.

The plan never went ahead, but American survey teams inspected the proposed testing site.

The prime minister at the time, Harold Holt, vetoed the plan.

His former staffer, Peter Bailey, says the Australian government was concerned that its Cold War alliance with the US would be damaged if it did not acquiesce. (ABC News Online)

Sadistic fuckers.

Less than a decade earlier, Australian and British troops and Indigenous Australians had been the victims of nuclear testing at Maralinga, South Australia. British troops were ordered to crawl through radioactive fallout in order to get as much contamination on their clothing as possible. In order to facilitate the tests, the Tjatjara people of the area were removed from their traditional lands to a reserve at Yalata; nonetheless, thousands of Aborigines died of radiation exposure. In 1956, the arsehole that required licking at the expense of public safety belonged to the British government, with which the Australian government collaborated to ensure that the nefarious effects of the Maralinga tests (and those at the Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia in 1952) remained under a black mist of secrecy. Australia’s chief apologist for the testing, physicist Sir Ernest Titterton, remarked that “if Aboriginal people objected to the tests they could vote the government out,” their lack of citizenship status and ineligibility to vote notwithstanding.

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

The week in fundie . . .

1. The mind-virus that is creationism has infected British schools, 40 of which are teaching in science classes that evolution is a “myth” and creationism a “fact,” according to a survey of Islamic, Jewish and Christian Evangelical schools. 1000 of the students being lied to about the scientific status of creationism attend schools wholly funded by the British taxpayer. (Ekklesia)
2. Demonstrating its firm commitment to religious freedom, the Indonesian government has told Ahmadi Muslims in that country to convert to mainstream Islam or face 5 years in jail. (Online News)
3. In Cheshire, UK, two schoolboys were given detention after refusing to pray to Allah during an RE lesson. (Telegraph)
4. In Herefordshire, a student will have to take four separate buses to travel to school after the local council banned non-Catholic students from using the subsidised bus service it provides to St Mary’s school. (Telegraph)
5. A 23-year-old woman in Mexico strangled to death a 16-year-old mother, and also killed her 3-month-old baby, because she thought the mother was practicing witchcraft against her. (PR-Inside)
6. A professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary blames the phenomenon of spousal abuse on women who refuse to submit to their husbands’ “God-given authority.” Those mouthy bitches, Bruce Ware maintains, “desire to have their own way instead of submitting to their husbands because of sin.” (via Fundies Say the Darndest Things)
7. Haredi Jews in Jerusalem vandalised and razed shops selling MP4 devices, which have been banned by the Orthodox Righteous Court of Law because they are apparently “the devil’s way to try and gain entrance to our protected homes and yeshivas, disguised as something you can listen to Torah lessons through.” (via Fundies Say the Darndest Things)
8. In Romania, where abortion is outlawed, an 11-year old girl who was raped by her uncle will be allowed to abort her foetus, despite threats by 20 Orthodox Christian groups to press charges if the abortion goes ahead. (via Fundies Say the Darndest Things)