Religion vs Death

Anyone who still thinks religion has been a benign force in this world need to read the compilation that James Haught made in a 1990 edition of the Skeptical Review.  Below is a segment to whet your appetite:

“– The Thirty Years’ War produced the largest religious death toll of all time. It began in 1618 when Protestant leaders threw two Catholic emissaries out of a Prague window into a dung heap. War flared between Catholic and Protestant princedoms, drawing in supportive religious armies from Germany, Spain, England, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, France and Italy. Sweden’s Protestant soldiers sang Martin Luther’s “Ein ‘Feste Burg” in battle. Three decades of combat turned central Europe into a wasteland of misery. One estimate states that Germany’s population dropped from 18 million to 4 million. In the end nothing was settled, and too few people remained to rebuild cities, plant fields, or conduct education.”

I’ve had people tell me that it is men doing these dastardly deeds and not God or the religion.  I have to disagree with this interpretation.  There are passages in the Bible and Koran that are constantly interpreted / misinterpreted and used as an excuse to maim and kill those who believe differently.  The Catholics and Protestants still barely talk to each other, and the Muslims still kill anybody that disagrees with them.  The Muslims kill the Hindus and the Hindus kill the Muslims

“It’s fashionable among thinking people to say that religion isn’t the real cause of today’s strife in Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, India and Iran — that sects merely provide labels for combatants. Not so. Religion keeps the groups in hostile camps. Without it, divisions would blur with passing generations; children would adapt to new times, mingle, intermarry, forget ancient wounds. But religion keeps them alien to one another.

Anything that divides people breeds inhumanity. Religion serves that ugly purpose.”

Remember this was written before  9-11

A passing thought as I go to close this post.  The Republican Religious Right wing wants to return a measure of religious control to America

The Republican Religious Party is Winning Control…

…Of Women’s Bodies.  The Republican War on Women is alive and well

The Republican Religious Party is winning the war to gain control of women’s bodies, and therefore their reproductive lives.  I am thankful that my daughters are grown now and do not plan any more children.  I am terribly sorry that my 4 years old granddaughter will now have the state control her choices as a reproducing female in America.  Evil religion is behind all this.

• ARIZONA now has the earliest surgical abortion ban  in the nation at 20 weeks, and the earliest medical abortion ban at 7 weeks.   Arizona sucks; it is controlled by a Republican religious junta.
• ALABAMA wants to make it nearly impossible to receive RU-486.  All women move awayquickly…the state of Alabama does not have your best interest at heart
• GEORGIA’S horrendous “women as livestock” bill forces women to carry non-viable fetuses to term.  Women as Livestock…aka women are not allowed to control their own bodies.  Horrendous doesn’t even begin to describe the evilness of this law.  The South Sucks
• TENNESSEE is criminalizing harm to embryos.  Just try drinking a glass of wine, or walking into a smoke filled room there.
• TEXAS women are forced to look at the image of their most likely “trans-vaginal” ultrasound and listen to the fetal heartbeat.  This is actually State Rape…you will not be allowed to opt out of this travesty.  Thank your local Republican politicians for this.  Another failed state.
• MISSISSIPPI will become the first abortion-clinic-free state in July. (Just picture the license plate slogan!)  Everyone with any sense will leave this failed state soon.  Mississippi stands at the bottom of all indicators of a happy place to live
• SOUTH CAROLINA seeks to eliminate abortions in the case of rape from their health plans.  Also planned is to eliminate abortion in case of Incest…this is the grossest form of state control ever.
• WISCONSIN Planned Parenthood clinics have halted all medical abortions.  Quick leave the state.  Republican Religious Party governor Scott Walker is being recalled for being a asshats.

America is rapidly approaching being a State controlled fascist country…and it is the Republican Religious Party and their doublespeak tactics that is leading us there.  They and their church buddies are Evil.

TEOTWAWKI…Again

I found another loonie Christian “Prophet” who is predicting TEOTWAWKI.  This time it’s going to be pretty soon…May 27^th, 2012

You have a little more than a month to put your affairs in order.  You’ve been warned

PR text for the book he has written to advance his “prediction”

“The year 2008 marked the last of God’s warnings to mankind and the beginning in a countdown of the final three and one-half years of man’s self-rule that will end by May 27, 2012.

On December 14, 2008, the First Trumpet of the Seventh Seal of the Book of Revelation sounded, which announced the beginning collapse of the economy of the United States and great destruction that will follow. The next three trumpets will result in the total collapse of the United States, and once the Fifth Trumpet sounds the world will be thrust into WW III.”

I’ve marked that date on my calender.

Website at: http://www.the-end.com/

Should Religion Be Exempt From Criticism

“I look forward to the day when violence done under the influence of religious passion is considered more dishonorable, more shameful, than crimes of avarice, and is punished accordingly, and religious leaders who incite such acts are regarded with the same contempt that we reserve for bartenders who send dangerously disabled people out onto the highways.

I also look forward to the day when pastors who abuse the authority of their pulpits by misinforming their congregations about science, about public health, about global warming, about evolution must answer to the charge of dishonesty. Telling pious lies to trusting children is a form of abuse, plain and simple. If quacks and bunko artists can be convicted of fraud for selling worthless cures, why not clergy for making their living off unsupported claims of miracle cures and the efficacy of prayer?”
Daniel C. Dennett Co-director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University

And the Catholic Church keeps asking for free speech to be censored.  And the Republican religious right wants to put people in jail for blasphemy and other religious/church crimes.  The future is indeed going to be interesting…and maybe deadly.

Religion And Politics…Very Scary

I keep hearing that ol’ G.W. was trying to kick start the Apocalypse with invading Iraq

Having a pretty good idea of how the man **thinks…I think the rumor is probably true.

**From watching and listening to him for 8 loooooong years.

Gods Special Plan…Sucks

You know it really happens everyday

Well, not the Pig

Church And State Must Be Separate…Ronald Reagan

To all of those people out there who are following the current ‘Republican Dream’ of establishing America as a ‘Christian Nation’   Perhaps you might want to emulate your ‘Hero’ instead.

“We in the United States, above all, must remember that lesson [of the Holocaust], for we were founded as a nation of openness to people of all beliefs. And so we must remain. Our very unity has been strengthened by our pluralism. We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate. All are free to believe or not believe, all are free to practice a faith or not, and those who believe are free, and should be free, to speak of and act on their belief.”  Ronald Reagan, 1984  My bolding and underline.

Happy Darwin Day

Tomorrow is ‘Darwin Day’

Darwin Day is a global celebration of science and reason held on or around Feb. 12, the birthday anniversary of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin.   Charles Darwin was born  in 1809 and first published his ‘On the Origin of Species’  on November 24, 1859

Darwin’s book introduced the scientific theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. It presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution.

Today the Theory of Evolution still stands very strong…despite all the lying rhetoric constantly thrown at  it by religious creationist types.

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Why Do People Laugh At Creationists

Republicans Are Trying To Abuse Women Again

The fight against domestic violence is getting a lot harder in New Hampshire.  The Republicans have introduced two bills in the state’s legislature that will prevent police from protecting domestic abuse victims.

 This article from the Concord Monitor explains:
“Domestic violence is no longer taken lightly legally or by society. That’s the way it should be, but two bills under consideration by this most unusual of legislatures, would undo that progress and put lives in danger. Both deserve a speedy defeat.

House Bill 1581 would turn the clock back 40 years to an age when a police officer could not make an arrest in a domestic violence case without first getting a warrant unless he or she actually witnessed the crime. That’s an exceedingly dangerous change.

Consider the following scenario, one outlined for lawmakers by retired Henniker police Chief Tim Russell:

An officer is called to a home where she sees clear evidence that an assault has occurred. The furniture is overturned, the children are sobbing, and the face of the woman of the house is bruised and bleeding. It’s obvious who the assailant was, but the officer arrived after the assault occurred. It’s a small department, and no one else on the force is available to keep the peace until the officer finds a judge or justice of the peace to issue a warrant. The officer leaves and the abuser renews his attack with even more ferocity, punishing his victim for having called for help.
…

It’s impossible to say how many lives the policy, in place since the 1970s, has saved or how many injuries it’s prevented. If they adopt House Bill 1581, lawmakers might find out, but the price paid could be extraordinarily high.”

The other prospective bill, HB 1608 would limit a judge’s discretion to have a violator of a domestic violence restraining order arrested and would interfere with polices ability to stop the threat of domestic violence…and seriously eliminate restrictions to offenders in violence cases.

Now this fits in perfectly with the new Religious Republican agenda of stripping rights and protection of the law from the women in our ‘equal’ society.  They will stop at nothing to oppress and violate the sovereignty of our Moms, Daughters, granddaughters, and Sisters… bodies and souls.

This of course is driven by the evangelical fundamentalist leaders of the Republican Party in the US, and their desire to put the modern women back in her place as a homemaker and baby maker…barefoot and pregnant as it were.  It’s all about religion…at the expense of the human rights of all women.