Onward (un)Christian Soldiers (Smug Atheist Barf Alert)

New York Press ^ | Matt Taibbi

[Carthago delenda est]

I am making this appeal to New York City, because this is the only place in America where such an appeal can still be made. I just saw Billy Graham’s Qualcomm Stadium telecast on ABC, and I believe that there are legitimate grounds for the godless among us to demand equal time according to Section 315 of the 1934 Communications Act.

Non-believers in America are far too polite, which will prove to be their undoing. There is a reason why the life of a typical atheist family resembles the Marshall-Will-and-Holly model from Land of the Lost. They live in caves, only venturing out for food and water, conceding the entire plush territory to T-Rex and the idiotic Sleestack. A guilty conscience prevents them from taking positive steps to change the situation: We’re only here by mistake, it was our own fault for rafting down those rapids, this is their world, not ours...

This is a mistake. Land of the Lost was an inaccurate representation of humanity. What would have really happened in that situation is propagation of the species by Marshall, Will and Holly–incest be damned. Within a generation or two, the Sleestack would be wearing striped pajamas and cultivating our fields, while our chief dinosaur problem would be how to get them to mate in captivity. To depict things any other way is to sell human intelligence short.

Which brings us to Billy and Franklin Graham. These fifth-rate shysters, both close personal friends of the president, have spent decades engaged on a relentless quest to turn the United States into the world’s revenge on smart people. Not only are they succeeding–have succeeded–but no one is doing anything about it.

[Carthago delenda est]

I've excerpted this crappy article because it includes bad language and I think FReepers should be warned of its puke-inducing nature before proceeding further.

I have frequently thought that atheists sometimes make incisive points and that their arguments are worth listening to, if not agreeing with: but I find myself totally repelled by many of them on a personal level. A large number of them are stupefyingly arrogant people who derive an almost sadistic joy from ridiculing the deeply-held beliefs of their fellow citizens.

In addition, many of them replace the idea of God with leftist politics, which they expect to bring heaven on earth. They cannot escape from human nature: as Paul Hollander has shown (see his book Political Pilgrims), many left-wingers treat politics as a religion, refusing to question the central tenets of their leftist "faith."

Some militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and the late Julian and Thomas Huxley make fundamentalist preachers look like nobodies in the dogmatism sweepstakes.

[Paul Atreides]

Non-believers in America are far too polite

What world is this nutcase living in?

[man of Yosemite]

What kind of slime do you have to be to slam Billy Graham? These people get equal time constantly. Ever watched the rest of the TV channels? I rest my case.

[concerned about politics]

Non-believers in America are far too polite

Sure. Kicking the righteous out of the schools, the public square, and demanding all reference to the birth of Christ on Christmas be removed sure is a really polite thing to do - NOT!
Fascist jerk.

[Redcoat LI]

I agree.
It does seem as though leftist have simply replaced religion with their politics.
They look upon people who do not think as they do as heretics,and persecute them with a vigor that rivals the Spanish Inquisition.

[Captainpaintball]

I look forward to the day when Christian feet are finally "put down"...on the necks of twerps like Taibbi.

[The Westerner]

"The threat that the Grahams of the world pose isn’t merely that they are cynical hucksters who steal money and influence from the spiritually desperate. It’s that they preach servility and unworthiness."

Amen to that.

[Kevin Curry]

Some militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and the late Julian and Thomas Huxley make fundamentalist preachers look like nobodies in the dogmatism sweepstakes.

The apogee of atheist unglory was realized in the late unlamented Soviet Union and its unholy spawn from Red China to Albania. As perfectly and comprehensively as possible, those nations achieved what Dawkins, the smirking author of this piece, and and the ACLU seek to achieve in our country today: the annihilation of religious expression and monopolization of thought and public life by atheists. Over 100 million souls were slaughtered, sacrified to the demigod Darwin and "progressivism" in the relentless pursuit of that twisted, miserable goal.

May they fail; may they fail miserably. I know I will do my part, will give my all to thwart them.

[Blood of Tyrants]

A true atheist would be polite and regard all religions as silly, harmless superstitions. This creep is just another God hating, anti-Christian.

[Paul Atreides]

What we ought to be doing is asserting our Darwinian prerogative: saturate their habitats with lizard repellent, then laugh all the way to the bank as they scatter in all directions, hissing and gasping and bumping brainlessly into walls and each other in a doomed search for safe ground.

I'm assuming you will belt out a big "Amen to that!" to this notion, as well.

[boycott]

The way I understand it is that the majority has rights too.

Athiest make way too much noise for such a pathetic little group.

[calvin sun]

This question may be off-topic, but at any rate: whatever happened to the group Fundamentalists Anonymous? They were big during the 1980's (e.g. the founders were interviewed by Phil Donahue). One of the founders was a Richard Yao, who graduated from Yale Divinity School.

The group consisted of people who had become disillusioned or traumatized by "fundamentalist" churches.

[Paul Atreides]

This guy has some serious issues. I must admit, it took him a whole lot longer to mention the Crusades than I thought. I do wish that he, and his brethren, who are terrified of President Bush and John Ashcroft would present me with one person who has been forcibly converted to Christianity. He has gone to a lot of trouble to write a screed about something that I knew was coming: the desire to get rid of Christians, even when they are voluntarily worshipping in a non-governmental setting.

[The Westerner]

Then you assume wrong. Don't put words in my post.

[Paul Atreides]

I'd might as well, since you like to give an impassioned rah-rah to a person who assigns to me, and others, attributes that conform to his own stereotype of a Christian.

[gcruse]

[He goes on...]

When the Sleestack herd themselves into football stadiums to organize and engage in elaborate shows of public self-debasement, the rest of us sit around in our houses, chuckle to ourselves and say, "Man, that’s scary"–and then go right back to fucking up the Times Thursday crossword.

What we ought to be doing is asserting our Darwinian prerogative: saturate their habitats with lizard repellent, then laugh all the way to the bank as they scatter in all directions, hissing and gasping and bumping brainlessly into walls and each other in a doomed search for safe ground.

In any fight, you must meet force with force. Evangelism is naturally expansive. Atheism is defensive. That is why they are growing, and we’re sitting around like idiots watching as pious troglodytes occupy the White House and send us hurtling hundreds of years back in time, to the age of the Crusades.

Regarding the equal-time clause of the Communications Act: The argument could easily be made that Billy and Franklin Graham’s telecasts have a definite political content, and that in an election year, the other side deserves an equal response. This goes beyond the fact that Billy Graham was in the White House with George Bush Sr. on the night we launched the first invasion of Iraq. More to the point, Franklin Graham–a key proponent of Bush’s faith-based initiative, incidentally–is an honorary chairperson of an extraordinary organization called the Presidential Prayer Team.

This nondenominational Christian organization, which claims over a million members, is dedicated to a "singular purpose: to encourage specific nationwide prayer for the President."

What this means, practically, is that the group calls upon its members to pray not only for the health and well-being of George Bush, but also for his policies. On its amazing website (presidentialprayerteam.org, one of the great sources of unintentional comedy on the planet), the group issues daily prayer requests for its members to follow. Here is a sample from Dec. 11:

Pray for three significant developments in President Bush’s efforts to strengthen and restore Iraq:

1. For Secretary of State Powell as he works to involve more NATO and United Nations members in the rebuilding of Iraq.

2. For the development of new businesses and free enterprise in Iraq. As Americans and others begin to invest in businesses there, pray for God’s blessing and strength in the economic recovery of that nation.

3. For James Baker as he steps up to serve President Bush by helping restructure the debt in Iraq. Pray for wisdom and cooperation for all his initiatives.

That is some weird-ass Christianity, praying for God to assist James Baker’s efforts to restructure Iraq’s debt. One wonders how Christians in Russia, whose country is owed $8 billion by our new satellite, will pray on this matter. Additionally, the idea that God should be called upon to help Americans recover their investments in Iraq is a little strange, to say the least. I must have missed that section of the Bible.

The Presidential Prayer Team issues a disclaimer, saying that it is not affiliated with the government and that it would serve "future leaders." But I don’t think that it takes a genius to see that it would cease to exist the day, say, Al Sharpton is elected president.

The time has come to put a stop to this sort of thing. And the way to do it is not to shrug off the evangelical lunacy and simply oppose them on the political front. We must attack the religion directly. They are trying to convert us. I think it is high time we start trying to convert them.

Christianity has opposed social and scientific progress virtually every step of the way for the last 2000 years, and I suppose a short portion of the one-hour equal-time broadcast could be devoted to a brief summary of this excellent legacy. Perhaps Industrial Light & Magic could be hired to recreate the fourth century burning of the Library of Alexandria by Christian zealots, with some space given to the doubtless very cinematic torture and execution of the mathematician and librarian Hypatia. The bonfire of original works by Plato and Eratosthenes would be a nice touch there as well. One could move on to scenes of the persecution of Copernicus and Galileo (the latter forced by the Inquisition to renounce his writings, gravity being a quack theory), the banning of surfing and hula by Christian missionaries in Hawaii, the nailing of African ears to poles by missionaries accompanying slave traders (they wouldn’t listen otherwise), the reading aloud of the Bible at slave auctions, the widespread opposition of organized religion to women’s suffrage…and so on. This section of the show could be given a title like, "There are only so many mulligans."

But that would just be the appetizer. The real show would be devoted to a merciless deconstruction of the Christian myth. I only have 150 words left in this column, so I can’t get into that part of it here. But it can be done. It certainly can’t be any harder than arguing with a straight face that human thought ended 2000 years ago when a supposedly omnipotent God, in a strategic masterstroke that for two millennia has had decidedly ambiguous results, elected to solve man’s problems by sending his half-supernatural son to Earth to be crucified by petty bureaucrats who, if given a toothbrush, probably would have tried to comb their hair with it.

The threat that the Grahams of the world pose isn’t merely that they are cynical hucksters who steal money and influence from the spiritually desperate. It’s that they preach servility and unworthiness. People who buy into what they preach are unable, as Bertrand Russell put it, to "stare the world frankly in the face." Our country is as stupid as it is because so many of its citizens are afraid to look at it.

We ought to be teaching people to behave like men, not dogs, and I think that deserves equal time. Volume 16, Issue 51

[Carthago delenda est]

It does seem as though leftist have simply replaced religion with their politics.

I think every conservative ought to read (or at least browse) this book, which was incidentally written by a secularist sociology professor who survived both the Nazis and the Communists in his native Hungary (he is Jewish).

The book is filled with examples of true-believing leftists (most of whom were irreligious) spouting off stupefyingly stupid comments about left-wing dystopias of various types, such as the Soviet Union during the 1930's, China during the 1950's, Cuba and Nicaragua in later years, etc. The leaders of these nations would take the tourists on a Potemkin village trip, and they would swallow the "workers' paradise" garbage hook, line, and sinker.

The writer Malcolm Muggeridge, who was in Moscow during the early 1930's, told stories about seeing pacifists cheering Soviet military parades, feminists overjoyed at the sight of women bent under a hundredweight of coal, architects ecstatic at the sight of crumbling buildings, etc. Soviet government workers, he said, used to make up the most incredible, impossibly b.s.-laden statistics on economic output and feed it to these left-wing tourists, just to see how gullible they really were. Many of these "statistics" would later make their way into official scientific and political publications in Amerca.

What else can explain this but a religious impulse? The leftists simply replaced faith in God with faith in communism. Rather than believing in a heaven after death, they believed in a heaven on earth. They could not escape human nature: they had to believe in something.

Remember this the next time you hear a left-wing atheist (most of them are left-wing) talk about how his beliefs are based on "reason" and yours are based on "superstition."

[concerned about politics]

This author fears morality, or he fears God. Christianity makes him see himself in the mirror, and he doesn't like what he sees.
He blames other people, government, and God for his own failure and sinful miserable lifestyle.
He needs to start attending a nice church. He lives in such a dark, dark world.

[gcruse]

He lives in such a dark, dark world.

He, in turn, might characterize yours as being a
fantastic world inhabited by invisible gods who
are behind everything that happens, unless it is
bad, then it's a demon's fault.

[RichInOC]

Matt, if you're reading this, I'd answer you as you deserve, but it's Christmas Eve and my Christian conscience won't let me...not after reading Russ Smith's reply to you. It must suck to be you tonight. I suspect that--figuratively at least--you're sleeping on your stomach while the multiple orifices he tore you heal. So I'll content myself with praying that God grant you a merry Christmas and a blessed 2004. That will probably sting you far worse anyway.

P.S.: Might I suggest you try studying Mark Morford on sfgate.com? If you can't bring yourself to treat God and His people with common courtesy, at least you could occasionally aspire to comic relief.