These pranks by Jesus are downright hilarious:
I'm so glad to live in a culture in which people don't believe that the prankster is actually Jesus or some other miracle-worker! (Well... some poor souls do seem to experience a few moments of awe.)
The NY Times recently published an lengthy article entitled The Criminalization of Bad Mothers. It examines the criminal prosecutions of women for endangering or harming their fetus due to drug use under "chemical endangerment" laws:
There have been approximately 60 chemical-endangerment prosecutions of new mothers in Alabama since 2006, the year the statute was enacted. Originally created to protect children from potentially explosive meth labs, Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law prohibits a “responsible person” from “exposing a child to an environment in which he or she . . . knowingly, recklessly or intentionally causes or permits a child to be exposed to, to ingest or inhale, or to have contact with a controlled substance, chemical substance or drug paraphernalia.”The law is being applied to pregnant women due to the efforts of "personhood" advocates, who seek to grant full legal rights to zygotes from the moment of fertilization.
Pastor John Hagee is no friend of the separation of church and state:
As it happens, I discussed whether the United States is a Christian nation in a recent Philosophy in Action Radio Show. It's Question 4 of the 3 June 2012 Q&A. The question was:
Is the United States a Christian nation? People often claim that the United States is "a Christian nation." What do people mean by that? Why does it matter? Is it true or not?Listen Now
This World Net Daily article -- Evolution to Fall in 2012? -- is so much wrong in so few words that my head nearly exploded on reading it. For instance, the article...
I must admit, I'm a bit alarmed by any pairing of Christianity and violence. However, this Fight Church Trailer is so strange as to be funny:
Yes, it's real, not satire. See the Kickstarter project and this USA Today article.
40 Percent of Young Adults Think Birth Control 'Doesn't Matter':
In abstinence-only sex education classes across the country, kids are taught that condoms have a 30 percent failure rate, that the pill causes cancer, and that pregnancy can result from touching another person's genitals -- if the curriculum mentions contraception at all. It's no wonder that many young adults don't understand how birth control works. A new Guttmacher study quizzed 1,241 sexually active young adults between 18 and 29 about contraception, asking them to choose "true" or "false" for basic statements like "all IUDs are banned from use in the United States" or "condoms have an expiration date." More than half of young men and a quarter of young women received a D or F on the quiz. Six in 10 underestimated the effectiveness of oral contraceptives.As discussed in this Salon article -- Why Obama's in bed with abstinence-only education -- the Obama Administration funds ridiculously ill-informed abstinence-only sex education, including the Heritage Keepers Abstinence Education.
Unsurprisingly, the more young people knew about birth control, the less likely they were to have unprotected sex. For each correct response a woman scored on the quiz, her odds of expecting unprotected sex in the next three months decreased by 9 percent. Meanwhile, her chances of using a hormonal or long-acting reversible method of birth control increased by 17 percent.
And it's not as if the ones forgoing contraception are ready to become parents: 69 percent of the women and almost half of the men claimed to be "committed to avoiding pregnancy." A full 40 percent of them agreed that birth control really doesn't matter -- "when it is your time to get pregnant," they agreed, "it will happen." In other words, a significant number of young people's "commitment" to remaining childless involves crossing their fingers, not wearing condoms or swallowing pills.
David Deerson writes an excellent blog post on North Carolina's Despicable Amendment -- a.k.a. Amendment 1. The amendment -- up for a vote today (May 8th) -- would declare that “marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.”
David writes:
The amendment isn’t only a strike against gay marriage but also civil unions, regardless of the gender composition of the partners. Depending on the courts interpretation of the language of the amendment, it could:
- invalidate domestic violence protections for all unmarried partners;
- undercut existing child custody and visitation rights that are designed to protect the best interests of children;
- prevent the state from giving committed couples rights to allow them to order their relationships, including threatening their
- ability to determine the disposition of their deceased partner’s remains;
- make medical decisions if their partner is incapacitated
- allow second-parent adoptions in order to ensure that both partners have a legal tie to, and financial responsibilities for, the
- children they are raising.
- invalidate trusts, wills, and end-of-life directives by one partner in favor of the other.
Dan Savage has taken a lot of heat for these critical comments on the Bible, but I think he's right. Just as modern Christians ignore the Bible's teachings on shellfish, masturbation, and slavery, they should ignore the Bible's teachings on homosexuality.
Nebraska Couple Watches Their Baby Die Because of New Law:
Nebraska mother Danielle Deaver, held her brand new, premature baby daughter last December. She watched her struggle to breathe for 15 short minutes, and then die in her arms.Read the rest of the story. Anti-abortion laws always -- always -- inflict unnecessary tragedies on people who desperately want children. Read more...
Deaver's water broke late in November, just past 20 weeks' gestation. When she went to the hospital, doctors told her that it was unlikely that her baby would survive, no matter what they did. There was no therapy that would help a baby that young. The doctors explained that the lack of fluid would cause muscle tissues to shorten, affecting the baby's developing lungs. They would likely never develop beyond the 22-week point, and the baby would not be able to breathe.
After a long talk, the Deavers decided that they would like to terminate the pregnancy, rather than waiting for their daughter to be born naturally and suffer. However, in October, Nebraska recently enacted a new, stricter law that prevents abortions after the 20th week of gestation except in very specific situations where the mother's life is immediately in danger. Deaver's situation was outside the law, and there was nothing doctors could do to help her.
The Daily Show mocks the "personhood" movement:
| The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Bro-Choice | ||||
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Man jailed for using chloroform to rape his new bride:
A husband who raped his new wife after knocking her out with chloroform when she refused him sex has been jailed for eight years.Just eight years?!? Read more...
The man, 35, tied her to a bed with a scarf and used the anaesthetic twice during their six-week marriage. His wife, a Bangladeshi immigrant, 23, first turned him down on their wedding night because she was too nervous.
The husband had denied the two rapes in Poplar, East London.
At the Old Bailey, prosecutor Richard Hearnden said: “She says she was forced to marry him. “The period of time between the defendant first meeting her and the marriage ceremony was extremely short.”
I got a laugh out of this image demonstrating the creation of a person:
(Via Rational Hub.)
There's a very real war against girls and women going on in Afghanistan:
At least 140 Afghan schoolgirls and female teachers were admitted to a local hospital Tuesday after drinking poisoned water, said local health officials, who blamed the act on extremists opposed to women's education.It's not the first time: "In 2010, more than 100 schoolgirls and teachers were sickened in a series of similar poisonings." Read more...
The victims range in age from 14 to 30 and were taken to a hospital in Afghanistan's northeastern Takhar province after their school's water tank was contaminated, according to provincial health department director Dr. Hafizullah Safi.
No deaths were reported, but more than half the victims partially lost consciousness, while others suffered dizziness and vomiting
Pro-tip: Don't attempt to dismiss concerns of environmentalists by claiming that the earth has been around for 6000 years, and that's a long time, so surely this mine won't cause any problems. I kid you not.
I love this quote by John Lewis, from his 2006 post Theocracy and Precedent:
But while explicit calls for socialism remain among only a small group of leftists, our country has nevertheless adopted socialist policies impossible three generations ago. The encroachment of religiously-based laws can accomplish a similar theocratic result in less time, if not opposed in a principled way. Fines against the media for 'indecency,' and 'faith-based' initiatives, are cases in point; all such censorship and religious socialism set precedents for even greater attacks on our freedom in the future. The price of a secular society is eternal vigilance against such laws, and intransigent opposition to the ideas and people that make them possible.Check out the blog of The Objective Standard here. Read more...
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