F*&%K your "religious freedom." Don't tell me that what you believe is "TRUE." It's just what you believe. And that's a FACT.

Someone with wisdom once said that the most important thing to know is the difference between what you KNOW and what you only THINK you know. (Many other people with just as much wisdom said the most important thing to know was something else. Another time for that.)

And it doesn't matter how many other people who also don't know anything also BELIEVE -- it's not only not necessarily so -- there's no way to know if it is or isn't.

First of all, people of all points of view -- including those very much aligned with mine -- seem to not have a clue that there's a difference between TRUTH and FACTS.

Every public babbler from the far Right side of Rush Limbaugh to the far Left of Ed Schultz, keeps insisting he or she speaks TRUTH.
(Limbaugh doesn't even speak FACTS -- he makes them up to please his narrative and never changes his insistence that THEY'RE TRUE, regardless of other facts proving them incorrect. He's not the only one and they're not ALL on the Right.)

But TRUTH?

TRUTH, like GOD, is a concept no one can prove or disprove.

Atheist or Pope -- no one can prove that what he or she believes is actually true.They can line up a big load of facts -- real ones, spurious ones, factoids -- doesn't matter -- you can pile up facts as high as an eagle flies --- FACTS do not add up to TRUTH. They're different things.

Apples do not add up to Oranges no matter how many you pile up.

Wondering if there IS or ISN'T a GOD is philosophical gymnastics at best but usually just mental masturbation and a waste of time.

NO ONE can actually ever know that answer, regardless of what he or she BELIEVES.
No one can ever prove it one way or another, and it doesn't matter.

A person -- observing his or her own process of mind might come to actually know what he or she BELIEVES and that it IS a BELIEF but not what IS or ISN'T.

I've noticed most people don't even believe in what they think they believe. Certainly not the religions they profess. Otherwise they'd actually practice what they preach. At best, they THINK they believe in it.

More often, they just like to think they believe, because they THINK that would mean one is a GOOD person. I recognize them -- it's kind of like when I look at my bookshelf and realize -- after a seriously intellectual book has sat there untouched for 5 years or more -- I just want to think I'm the sort of person who would read that of book, but I finally realized I'm not -- one more meaningless bit of pretense I can drop.

(There's something to be learned there, so it's not a total waste. For example, it makes me recognize Newt Gingrich for the intellectual-manque poseur he is and to recognize all the people who remark on how smart he is for the gullible schmucks they are. This year, that's a valuable thing to be able to see. Because I pretended to be the person I wanted to think I am long enough to read some of those books and recognized that he not only takes the quote out of context and THEN misquotes it, he didn't understand what was being said to start with. This is something I first noticed he was doing way back when he was misquoting and misunderstanding Alvin Toffler. And as I freely admit, I may be clever from time to time, but I'm not all that intelligent and certainly nothing like an actual intellectual.)

Back to the God-floggers.*

I don't know whether or not I believe in a God or a Not-God. NOT whether or not there is one -- just whether or not I believe in such a thing.
(My wife tagged this as being a "self-agnostic," and that's as useful a label as any.)
And, like computer solitaire or, even better, Freecell, it is interesting to me to notice, as time goes on, clues to how I think.

It's no use to ask those people -- those absolutely positively no doubt at all people
"Do you actually KNOW that?"
"Of course I know it.""How?"
"Because it's true."
"How do you know it's true?"
"Because I know it."

--At which point it's best to stop, because after that, they get violent.

Hell, I flunked Logic in college, and the fallacy in that little feedback loop is even obvious to me.
(I prefer to think my F was because it was an 8AM class and I just stopped going.)

So I beseech you all -- from Melissa Harris-Perry who is newly-added to Rachel Maddow in my pantheon of those I worship as Goddesses of Facts, History, Social Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology and all the way to Glenn Beck who is .. well, I have no idea what he is --- all of you -- PLEASE PLEASE learn and respect the difference between FACTS and TRUTH.

Journalists -- from the best to the worst, do FACTS.
(The best know this. It's the WORST who insist they're doing TRUTH.)

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*God-floggers, as distinct from those my wife refers to as "God-grifters.' The floggers sell what they believe or think they believe. The grifters sell what they want YOU to believe and pay them for the privilege.)

Catholic Bishops complain their "religious liberty" is harmed by their need to obey the laws of the land

Yeah, well as long as that liberty includes raping small children and then blaming the uproar on the Jews (see below) -- as long as it includes paying NO taxes thereby making the rest of us pay for their buildings and costumes and jewelry,  as long as it includes a total lack of respect for other people's beliefs and the arrogance to assume they have the right to point fingers and threaten their hell --- F$%K 'em.

The constitution allow them to PRACTICE their religion. It DOES NOT say they can do a psychic assault on people who are practicing THEIR OWN .. or NONE AT ALL.

 It ALSO doesn't say that congress CAN MAKE LAWS respecting establishment of religion -- and these days, a lot of us are thinking -- "HEY DOESN'T THAT MEAN YOU CAN"T HAVE LAWS EXEMPTING THEM FROM PAYING TAXES. 

TAX THE CHURCHES!!!

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Bishop Giacomo Babini blames Jews for attacks on Pope

A retired Italian bishop has provoked fury by reportedly suggesting that “Zionists” are behind the current storm of accusations over clerical sex abuse shaking the Vatican and the Catholic Church. Monsignor Giacomo Babini, the Bishop Emeritus of Grossetto, was quoted by the Italian Roman Catholic website Pontifex as saying he believed a “Zionist attack” was behind the criticism of the Pope, given that it was “powerful and refined” in nature.
Bishop Babini denied he had made any anti-Semitic remarks. He was backed by the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI), which issued a declaration by Bishop Babini in which he said: “Statements I have never made about our Jewish brothers have been attributed to me.”
However, Bruno Volpe, who interviewed Monsignor Babini for Pontifex, confirmed that the bishop had made the statement, which was reported widely in the Italian press today. Pontifex threatened to release the audio tape of the interview as proof.

Monsignor Babini’s reported comments follow a series of statements from senior Vatican cardinals blaming a “concerted campaign” by “powerful lobbies” for accusations that Pope Benedict XVI was involved in covering up cases of clerical abuse both as Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982 and subsequently as head of doctrine at the Vatican.
None has explicitly blamed Jews or any other group. However Bishop Babini, 81, said Jews “do not want the Church, they are its natural enemies”. He added: “Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are deicides [God killers].”
He was quoted as saying that Hitler was “not just mad” but had exploited German anger over the excesses of German Jews who in the 1930s had throttled the German economy.

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So does stealing the dead souls of others qualify as theft? Is that a Mormon tradition, theft?

They posthumously converted Elie Wiesel and now beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl.

These people have no decency at all ... no respect for other people's sensibilities or beliefs. 

So they stole the land from the Native Americans -- the Utes, but wottehell -- that's just good old American tradition, right?

Then they set up a way station around the Salt Lake taking what they wanted from pioneers on their way to California. Mostly scavenging what they travelers had dropped as too cumbersome to carry any farther. 

Nothing wrong with that, right? 

Just good old American entrepreneurship, right?

And they sold those things to others on their way -- mercantile tradition, right?

Or sometimes, if the travelers didn't care to dump their goods, they would steal them outright, even to the point of mass murder (as in the Mountain Meadow Massacre).

And now we see Mitt Romney, who made his fortune stealing jobs from workers and pension funds from their companies.

And then, of course, the whole godforsaken church stole the civil liberties from an entire class of Californians, overturning the legal right of same-sex marriage with their odious Proposition 8 -- using a campaign so filled with lies ("Elementary school children will be forced to study gay life styes..") that a full 22% of the people who voted FOR Prop 8 -- waay more than the winning margin -- said that had they known the actual facts, they never would have voted for it.

And now we get super thief Mitt Romney, a candidate who is unwilling to address questions about the "White Horse" ideal -- that it is their destiny to "save" the USA as intended by Joe Smith  ("...when the constitution is hanging by a thread..." SUPER MORMON will ride in on a White Horse and save America... as a Mormon-controlled theocracy.)

And stealing non-Mormon souls for posthumous baptism gets them Brownie points to enrich their own afterlife. Of course, the zombie converts will always be second-class spirits and only get a second-rate heaven -- those who "followed the law of Moses" go to the Terrestrial (Middle) Kingdom. So it's the usually-skipped verse in When the Saints Go Marching in --- "When the last Jew's converted..." (That's when they get the goodie bags.)

(The Highest Heaven -- the Celestial Kingdom is for God and those who followed his -- Mormon -- law. Kind of like afterlife Hamptons. The children of Moses get something like Levittown.)

I don't know if the lynch mob knew this sort of thing as part of what prompted them to come after Joe Smith. I don't know if this was what he had in mind, because -- to be fair -- it's important to note that NONE of Smith's descendants are part of the Salt Lake City mob that call themselves Mormon. Maybe they feel as much antipathy to them as I do -- or more, since it defames them directly.

But it's enough for me when I see the young cult-kids at my front door with their white shirts and black name tags, stealing my time, presumptuously following orders by assuming the person behind the doorbell has never thought about spiritual matters and has been waiting all his life for some pimply-faced adolescents to feed him a line of sadistic science fiction.

It's enough for me to open the door with a smile and greet the young god-mongers saying:

"Get the fuck off my porch. Your people have already caused enough pain to my neighbors."  

(Although sometimes I remember Sweet Billy, a stage-hand I used to work with, how he would have said, chiding me quietly for getting too far into the Big Bad Stage Manager Role: "Oh, be KIND -- they're so young ... and they're such a CUTE couple."  And if I'm in a good enough mood, I might add an observation from someone they probably never heard of -- Oscar Wilde):

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking others to live as one wishes to live. So now -- PLEASE get the fuck off my porch."