SATURDAY SOWELL

A Dangerous Obsession: One - Two - Three - Four. This is a nice introduction to some classic Sowell themes. I don't believe this man has ever been wrong in print, and he's pretty prolific.

Merry Christmas, happy Festivus, good Life Day to ye, and happy Kwanzza

Cross posted at Gay Celebrity Crap

NEW FEATURE: SATURDAY SOWEL

The saint has written. Go and adore.

This one's about the Duke "looking at boobs while white" case.

MY PROBLEM WITH YOUR RELIGION

Your religion is a melange of superstitions and wishful thinking
that reflects poorly upon my religion. You treat constructive criticisms of
it as Ad Hominem attacks upon the person of God. You refuse to present a
case for it's tenets, instead acting as if it were an ethnic group that one
is born into. Your religion spends its credibility justifying traditions,
heresies, and peculiar notions and behaviors, and has none left with which
to defend revealed scripture, which my religion treats as a higher
priority. Your religion mistakes respect for contempt, and vice versa.

From time to time I find myself strangely drawn to your blasphemous
gutter creed. It bears at least a superficial resemblance to
Judeo-Christian faith, and it pays lip service, at the very least, to the
Gospels. Often, I find myself strongly in agreement with you delusional
heretics on ostensibly political issues, such as abortion. However, certain
doctrinal points of your religion clash with my understanding of the Bible
and Reality.

When I ask for explanations of these points, your responses are
unsatisfactory in the extreme.

You redefine faith as the absence of or the opposite of reason, so
that internal inconsistencies in your position should presumably be taken
as evidence in its favor. I'm going to be inundated with imbicilic emails
to that effect soon. This dodge is a slander against all religion (among
other things), as it implies that whatever men place faith in necessarily
must not be a reasonable thing for them to believe in. The definition of
faith used in secular and Biblical contexts is perfectly serviceable, and
it is the one that my religion uses. As Douglas Addams demonstrated in the
babel-fish gag near the beginning of "The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy",
the piously inverted definition of faith commonly employed as an excuse for
your bloody-minded heterodoxy is actually an argument against the existence
of God. You have paraphrased and parroted this line so incessantly that it
has been accepted by secular society as axiomatic, and spawned a popular
cult of unreason. Atheism itself initially gained its veneer of
respectability when this defense mechanism was first devised. Please invest
in a dictionary.

A less objectionable tactic of yours, at least superficially, is
the way you divert all reasonable suspicions of your specious doctrines
toward the Bible. As a rule, you cast no direct aspersions on revealed
Scripture. Usually you begin by stressing the possible fallibility of
certain interpretations and translations. This, in itself, is neither
blasphemous nor heretical, but when apparent conflicts between the
documents handed down to us from God and more recent documents that are
clearly the product of human reason (at best) are INVARIABLY resolved by
defaming the historically accepted translations and the orthodox
interpretations of the Bible in defense of your weird dogmatic innovations,
you betray yourselves.

For example: When the Bible explicitly prohibits some practice that
has become an established tradition of your corrupt, human-led institution,
you argue that either the meaning of the Bible is so unclear as to make it
essentially useless as a way of knowing what God wants us to do, or that,
in effect, it is wrong. If your motto is to be "Let every religious
doctrine be true, and God a liar", then say so.

Other unsatisfactory responses to my questioning of your faith
include the way you slander the God of Abraham by saying that the promises
that He made to Israel no longer apply to Jews, hyper-piously pretend that
all who criticize you are anti-religious, allegorize passages of scripture
that context indicates were meant to be taken as straightforward statements
by God, and the way you respond to being caught in misdeeds by saying that
all other denominations do likewise. Would it kill you to take just one hit
for the team? Do you believe that it helps the cause of Christ somehow to
drag us all down with you?

At this point my original concerns remain, and are compounded by
the scads and scads of slanderous blasphemies that you've spewed all over
like squid ink to protect yourself from the possibility that you might be
moved to think your beliefs through a little and perhaps end up adopting
some honest, sincere variation of them. When I reiterate these concerns,
bring up others (such as the horrible mistreatment of children at the hands
of your clergy), or point out the implications of your defenses of your
sickening theological errors, you say that I am bigoted. Real nice.
Beautiful. I object to specific assertions of your publicly professed
belief system, which overlaps enough with my own for my God and I to keep
getting blamed for the hijinks of your cult's leadership, and that is
somehow the same as hating all Ainu just because they're hairy. That is
like calling someone a bigot for disagreeing with Communism or Feng Shui.
Isms are necessarily fair game for criticism, if you don't want people to
say that yours is false, you're supposed to try and convince them that it
is not. You've had plenty of time to make the case that your doctrines can
be reconciled with the Bible and that your sect is Christian. Mere
assertion is not a case, nor is denying that a case needs to be made, or
calling me a meanie for asking. That is not what Judeo-Christian believers
do, it's what tarot card readers do. Please try again.

Whenever a human soul tentatively begins to become receptive to
Christ, you people stand in their way, stigmatizing faith, blurring the
distinctions between worship and voodoo, equating religious morality with
both extreme sexual repression and hypocritical perversion, doing your
damnedest to interpret away all clear meaning from the Bible, and
performing pagan abominations in the name of Christ. When I with my own two
eyes do see you placing these obstacles and more in the path of the Christ
seeking soul, biting the ankles of Christ's own soul winners, should I not
object? Answer me, bitch!

Some practitioners of my own religion do many of the same things
mentioned in the previous paragraph, but it is rare for you to hear them
say that it is Christian to do so and wrong to criticize them for it.

Aside from this, my primary problem with your religion is my
respect for you as a human being. Those who profess to honor your beliefs
while not sharing them must necessarily hold you in contempt. What is not
good enough for them is good enough for you, they say. They are humoring
you. This precludes respect. Because they patronize you thus, you dub them
tolerant, as if you, the living images of God, were things to be merely
tolerated, like unkempt pubes on a cheap whore. Can you deny that they must
necessarily assume you to be inferior to themselves, at least
intellectually? The inherent dignity that I assume in you leads me to treat
you as responsible free agents, capable of reason, equal to myself,
creditable for your virtues and answerable for your errors, and to be
dubbed intolerant. You're welcome.

I bought a little gas at 7-11 last night. I had to go inside and pay first, which I didn't have to do there before. The lady who worked there said that it was because they were in the process of switching from Citgo gas. She'd mentioned before that they'd been having a lot of trouble with people stealing gas, but now she tells me that Citgo (a Red Venezualan outfit) used to EAT the cost of stolen gasoline! So basically, 7-11 hadn't been bothering to stop people from stealing it. Wish I'd known that back in the day. Anyway, I think that shows that Citgo exists more for political reasons than for profit.

Been thinking maybe I should start having some guest bloggers over here once in awhile.