Archive for December, 2006

Check out this lovely young woman who has only just started learning English.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6CbG7qopX0]

Hat tip to B.L. Ochman.

Viva Santos Claus

I love Boston. I really do. But have you ever seen our city hall? Have you seen the plaza surrounding it? The building is perhaps the ugliest structure in New England. I usually refer to it as “shitty hole.” The plaza… yikes. It’s a huge, empty space paved with brick. At one end is the JFK federal office building, which is ugly enough itself. At the other is the Government Centre T station, which looks like an air raid shelter. And in between, apart from Shitty Hole itself, nothing. OK, there’s something akin to an amphitheatre in there — some steps leading to a pit in the midst of the bricks. Woot.

There was a competition a few years back that sought suggestions to beautify the plaza. That led to adding some benches with stuff above them along the edge of the plaza, along Cambridge Street. Feh. You don’t fix up a massive null space by putting something at its edge.

Now I know what we need. United Visual Artists created an installation for a garden outside London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. It’s called “Volume,” and it’s like an interactive fountain made of light. It’s beautiful. It’s fascinating. It’s people-oriented. Click the image below for a video and a series of pictures.

I want.

What could be more fun? Blaspheme and win a DVD!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7QVbJnSPQE]

I just have a few little issues: I don’t have a video camera, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that I deny any and all gods, messiahs and holy spirits. I don’t need the video anyway. I can’t keep up with my NetFlix account as it is.

I hope this doesn’t turn into a peer pressure thing. “Not only do you have cooties, but you don’t have the guts to blaspheme! I dare ya to curse out the baby Jesus.” Don’t fuck with the theists, kids. It isn’t nice, and they’re very sensitive. Blaspheme all you like, but don’t pressure others to join you. You never know — your best buds might believe in deities.

I for one have deep regrets about debating with a rather fragile believer my first year of college. I made him sufficiently uncomfortable that he ended up with a list of questions for his minister and transferred to a Christian school the next year.

Finally, does it count as blasphemy if you don’t believe it in the first place? If you’re really an atheist, saying that you don’t believe in a god is about the same thing as saying you don’t believe in Stan and Inga (more about them another time, but for now suffice it to say that if it weren’t for Stan and Inga, there would be no electricity). In high school, I used to absolutely thrill my friends by looking up and saying, “fuck you, god.” To them (or some of them, anyway), this was beyond the excitement any slasher movie could provide. To me, not so much.

Update: Brian Flemming, who made the film The God Who Wasn’t There (the flick being given as a prize to our brave blasphemers), has a few interesting quotes about the challenge.

Richard Dawkins:

I had not given the Blasphemy Challenge any thought until you called it to my attention. Now that you have done so, I do not seem to feel strongly one way or the other. As that admirable bumper sticker has it, Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime. So, am I going to send in my own film clip denying the Holy Ghost? No, that is not what Oxford professors do, they write books instead. Do I find it offensive that so many young people are sending in their film clips? No. I hadn’t listened to any of them before you raised the matter. I have now done so, and I must say I find them more charming than offensive. They mostly seem rather nice young people, and they are doing their bit, in their own lively and entertaining way, to raise consciousness and set an example to their peers. I am especially pleased to note how young they are, for organized atheists have, until recently, been noticeably and discouragingly grey-headed. I think we may be witnessing the beginnings of a shift in the tectonic plates of our Zeitgeist. I am delighted to see so many young Americans taking part, in a way that suits their age group better than mine or yours.

Creationist Dave Scot (or as it says on his original post, DaveScot):

I found the images of young people in “The Blasphemy Challenge” giving up their immortal souls on a dare disturbing enough to make me weep for them. I’m not rationally convinced we have immortal souls to give up but certainly the possibility exists. Imagine on judgement day that was you in the video and it was being replayed. There’s nothing to gain and everything to lose in this. Please join me in a simple prayer for the young victims of this stunt.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Brings tears to your eyes.

Is it just me, or are the spots Target has been running on the eye of hell kind of frightening? They’re all in shades of white, silver, black and red. There’s something terribly… clean about them… like the images have been drained of life. The people are all smiling, sure, but it just doesn’t feel right. Am I the only one who thinks of Fascism when they see these adverts?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyr4K7RUu4M]

Yeah, it’s probably just me. But still, aren’t they weird?

Here’s a shocker for you. If you’ve read my various rants, you probably have me pegged as a standard issue liberal cum angry atheist with an odd (and not particularly funny, I suppose) sense of humor. But would you have guessed that I’m opposed to gay marriage? It’s true, and that’s in spite of the fact that I happen to be friendly with a couple of men who are married to each other.

OK, it’s not because I don’t think same-sex couples deserve the same things that straight couples do. It’s because I’m opposed to marriage itself, for anybody.

Maybe a bit more clarification is needed here. I’m not opposed to two people choosing to devote their lives to each other and create a family. I’m not opposed to them gathering their friends and family together to celebrate that commitment. I think it’s a lovely idea. I just don’t like the idea of governmental or religious organizations “pronouncing” marriages, as I don’t think it’s any of their business, much less something they should have any control over.

True, when you get married you expect the government to recognize the relationship and the rights and responsibilities that go with it. The way I see it, it’s simply a matter of telling the government that you’re married. The newlyweds go to a notary public, sign a declaration of marriage, get it stamped and sent to the government. In other words, they themselves have married, and that right isn’t granted by the government; it’s a right they already had without the government. The government’s only role here is to put it on record so that there won’t be any question of inheritance, next of kin, etc.

So, now New Jersey has joined Vermont and Connecticut in “allowing” same-sex couples to have “civil unions.” Yippee for them. I live in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, where we recognize that separate but equal ain’t equal.

As I understand it, the people who are opposed to same-sex marriages (and who claim it has nothing to do with hatred of gays) feel that marriage is a sacrament. They don’t always come out and say that, but I haven’t heard a single opinion on that side that hasn’t come down to a religious basis one way or another. Any other claims don’t make a lot of sense, because it’s not as if marriage is an institution that has remained unchanged for millennia. It was about property for most of the last few thousand years (including counting the wife as the husband’s property, given to him by her father), along with giving men a degree of assurance that the children they were raising were really their own. And until fairly recently in most societies, you didn’t get to pick the person you married. In some societies, it’s still that way. With that in mind, and if you don’t oppose gay marriage because you oppose gays, marriage is for a man and a woman because that’s what the religious organizations want, and when you seriously discuss this with someone who holds this position, all the points outside of religious dogma just don’t stand up. But religious dogma is religious dogma. There’s no point in arguing with it. I’m certainly not in a position to tell a Catholic that I know what their god wants better than the Pope does.

I’m thinking maybe we can all compromise. What if every state turned every “marriage” into a “civil union”? What I mean by that is that if the role of the government is simply to recognize the legality of a relationship between two people, whatever their gender, then what those three states call “civil unions” are really what the rest of the states currently call “marriage,” and ought to call “civil unions.”

And what happens to “marriage?” We can leave that to the religious organizations. If you want your relationship recognized by the government, go to city hall and get yourself a civil union. If you want that relationship recognized by the church, go to the church and get a priest to bless your civil union and pronounce it a marriage. If the church doesn’t want to bless your union, they don’t have to. We have religious liberty in this country, and religious groups are free to view things however they like. Jehovah’s Witnesses, as I understand it, don’t vote, because they don’t recognize the government of the United States. They only recognize the Kingdom of Jehovah. That’s their right.

So if your church won’t bless your marriage because you’re the same gender, because one of you has been divorced, because you’re not both members of the church, or even because the voice of god told the priest that this marriage was not to be, then that’s the church’s decision. Your options are to go to a different church, to work to change your church’s mind, or just to live in a civil union. You have the same rights as any couple as far as the government is concerned, but being recognized by the church requires you to meet the church’s criteria. The government doesn’t have the right to discriminate in that way.

Seems pretty simple to me. If we’re going to separate church and state, how can the church and the state both perform the same role when it comes to relationships and families? Get the government’s blessing (or recognition, anyway) from the government, and the church’s blessing from the church. They’re two different things.

Dear SAAB,
When you tell us that it’s the same aerodynamic principles keeping your jet in the air and your car on the ground, just which principles might you be referring to? Might it be that things with wings can fly, and things without wings tend not to fly?

I’m joining the Salivation Army.

The recruiter told me I could become a drool sergeant!

I guess I’m not quite done with this. I assume you’ve all heard about this Great Sea-Tac Christmas Tree Fiasco. What a load of crap.

I get it that some Rabbi thought it would be a good idea to put up a menorah in addition to the Christmas trees. I get it that when the trees were taken down the Rabbi made it clear that he was sorry — that this wasn’t the outcome he was looking for.

And I get but disagree with this concept of the Supreme Court determining Christmas to be sufficiently secular that putting up a Santa or a tree doesn’t cross the ol’ establishment line.

But if it’s secular, why do so many religious people take it so damn seriously? Did you see Lou Dobbs discussing the case with Jeffrey Toobin a few days ago? Lou was absolutely apoplectic! I can’t find the show transcript, but at one point he said something like, “And that… that…. that… that… Rabbi…” I don’t think “Rabbi” was the first word that came to his mind. It’s as if somebody told Lou that Rabbi Bogomilsky ran a sanctuary for Mexican illegal aliens in the basement of the shul.

Here are a few more over-reactions to the case from that Seattle Times article I linked to above:

Robert Jacobs, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, said more than a dozen organizations or rabbis had reported receiving hate e-mail. His organization was advising local Jewish institutions that have received significant numbers of hate e-mails to consider having security during Hanukkah and other holiday-season events.

The furor has been building for years. Last month, the Alliance Defense Fund, a religion-based legal-aid group in Arizona, announced it had lined up an army of attorneys who were prepared to defend the tradition of Christmas in schools and on public property.

“Frankly, it’s ridiculous that Americans have to think twice about whether it’s OK to say ‘Merry Christmas,’” said Alan Sears, the group’s president.

Jesus Christ (so to speak)! Who’s being ridiculous now? And you get wankers like O’Reilly complaining that all the religion has been taken out of the holiday. If you want the religion bit, go ahead, but then you can’t turn around and say it’s secular enough that it belongs on public land.

If you want your trees and your Santa and your shiny gifties wrapped at the mall and your stockings filled with gift cards from the Home Depot and Pottery Barn and the Gap, I say fine. But the lot of you have to say that this has nothing to do with Jesus. Jesus is the messiah of the Christian faith. Christmas is about Santa.

One or the other. Not both. Nope. But think about this: if you take the religion out of Christmas, you’ll end up with something akin to what the card pictured above is about. Notice the text. Notice the flag being carried by the lil’ cosmonaut. That’s right. Christmas without religion is like something out of the Soviet Union. The communist, atheistic Soviet Union. Would that make you happy? I doubt it.

My advice is to take Christmas back. Take it away from those horrible commercial, secular, godless heathens and keep it close to your heart as the holy day you know it to be. Don’t share it with the rest of us. We don’t deserve it.

Update: I haven’t located the transcript of Dobbs’ rant on the Rebbe, but thanks to Wonkette, I do have access to a column Lou wrote on the subject.

This week we were treated to the spectacle of an easily offended and highly offensive rabbi who walked into an airport, gazed upon Christmas trees all around him and suddenly was overwhelmed with an immense, and apparently irresistible, urge to sue the management of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport because nowhere among all the Christmas trees was a single menorah. Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement of Seattle even delivered to the airport’s management a draft of a lawsuit he would file if they didn’t sprinkle menorahs around the Christmas trees.

Political correctness in this country reached an entirely new level of absurdity some years ago. But occasionally, and the situation at Sea-Tac is just such an occasion, we exceed ourselves. The militant fundamentalist rabbi so flummoxed Sea-Tac management with his threat and their perceived obligation to be “politically correct” that, rather than think rationally or simply tell him to stuff it, they started hacking away at all those artificial Christmas trees and quickly descended into a public relations nightmare in which they managed to offend reason, cultural values and the vast majority of Americans.

Wonkette mocks Lou for referring to him as a “militant fundamentalist rabbi,” but if you’ve ever met a Lubavitcher…