Blogging Bright | Bright Pride

Liam Neeson Considers Becoming Muslim

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:49:11 -0500

Reposted from www.skepticmoney.com

After filming in Istanbul and being inspired by the Muslim call to prayer five times a day Liam Neeson is considering becoming a Muslim claiming “Islam got into his spirit.”

“The call to prayer happens five times a day, and for the first week, it drives you crazy, and then it just gets into your spirit, and it’s the most beautiful, beautiful thing.

“There are 4,000 mosques in the city. Some are just stunning, and it really makes me think about becoming a Muslim.

Liam, short for William in Irish and Scottish, born to a caretaker at Ballymena Boys All Saints Primary School was named after a local priest. His interest in acting resulted from being an alter boy and his sneaking into church to listen to minister Ian Paisly:

“He had a magnificent presence and it was incredible to watch this six foot-plus man just Bible-thumping away… It was acting but it was also great acting and stirring too.”

At nine he began taking boxing lessons at the All Saints Youth Club, became quite good at it, and won the Ulster boxing champion at 11.

Council of Nicaea, Holy Trinity or Polytheism?

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:46:26 -0500

Reposted from www.skepticmoney.com

The Nicene Screed, I mean Creed, Is the god affirming rant, that god is one and three, coeternal, and damn it, uhhh, you, if you don’t know the difference. It is also other canon law that mostly supports the whole jealous god thing that your only chance for salvation is through him and his minions. It firmly places deism as heretical and worthy of anathema. Now you know when a deist is claimed to be Christian it is total BS, damnation.

I most recently experienced the screed at the funeral of an in-law though the screed, creed, is also done on Sundays which I choose not to attend except under duress. Which is as it should be as I find nothing pleasant about it and worry that my children will catch a bad meme.

I really don’t understand why any family would expect a person of different faith to attend an event that requires a swearing of opposing fidelity. I understand that weddings, funerals, and occasional church are appropriate places for belief but in a community of varying faiths it would be gracious and right to not insist of someone to commit perjury merely to make the ceremony inclusive.

Tithing Romney

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:47:25 -0500

Reposted from www.skepticmoney.com

Mitt Romney tithes to his church, the LDS or mormons for slang, as detailed by Rachel Zollin the AP News. Keep religion out of politics unless you wish it examined on its merit… I continue.

“Romney reports he will give a total of $4.13 million to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over two years as part of his overall charitable donations. The former Massachusetts governor reported income of about $43 million for the two years. Separately, over the past decade, Romney and his wife, Ann, have given more than $4.7 million to the denomination through the Tyler Charitable Foundation, a multimillion-dollar trust the couple leads.

The LDS are a full family function for its members; they want your soul and your life. Their churches, wards, stake houses, and temples provide welfare, emergency services, and near all show necessary support. They also recommend members keep a two-year food supply for when the rapture, uhh, second coming, comes though they tell gentiles it’s for emergencies. Monday is family home night and on at least two other days a week there are Ward or Stake functions to attend. Additionally, members must “seal,” baptize, fifty or so dead people so they can be saved and there is a tremendous amount of genealogy performed, unfortunately some of it bad (many pro’s say terrible), to find family to save. This means Lincoln, Washington, probably Hitchens now, all baptized mormon.

Idiotic Video On Jesus Nopt Church

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:46:01 -0500

Reposted from www.skepticmoney.com

The idiotic Youtube video “Why I hate Religion, but Love Jesus” emphasizes the horrors of church and the wonders of Jesus. He aint’t judging but he’s saying that logic isn’t worthy and the core is Jesus; now that he knows Jesus he knows grace will save him. It has 16 million hits.

I will not post a picture of this horrid piece that tries to separate personal faith from the cosmic salesmen that promote faith but here is the link. This is as stupid as a car salesman that says it is not about the sales pitch it’s about the car. Of course it is the sales pitch or there wouldn’t be a car in the first place to sell and his is just another cosmic sales pitch for the same damned car.

He has just figured out a clever single church of himself. He is a lone witness to his faith rather than a community of people establishing a church to their faith. His solipsistic witnessing is no different than a dog howling to the wind because his owner won’t let him in, and he didn’t want in anyway.

Gingrich, Resentment and Forgiveness

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:45:12 -0500

Reposted from www.skepticmoney.com

Let’s see Paul is out, Perry is out, Santorum is out, Romney with revelation of his Swiss bank account (duh) is probably out and it looks like yes, it looks like Newt is in the lead. How on earth do the evangelicals and tea party types (they do not merit capitals until the occupy movement merits them) vote Gingrich? He is a philanderer, a patent liar, a DC insider, and does not really hold Jesus in his heart or wear him on his sleeve?

Newt Gingrich is evidence to two contrary and holy moods these days, resentment and forgivance. Howard Schreiber:

“… he shares their resentments. He resents the media (“elites”), the rich (the leadership of his own party), the Democrats (educated people), people who live in big cities (liberals), and of course, Obama, just as they do”

“Gingrich and his supporters do not oppose Obama, they resent the fact of his existence. He will speak for his constituents by articulating their resentments in more strident, more combative, more articulate terms than they can themselves, which is why they find him brilliant.”

Ron Paul Gets Patted

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:44:07 -0500

Reposted from www.skepticmoney.com

CBS, Stephanie Condon, reported that Ron Paul Jr was “detained” after setting off an alarm in Nashville, TN airport. Ron Jr has requested elitist scanning, after last year blasting pat downs:

In a June 2011 hearing, Paul told TSA administrator John Pistole,

“I think you ought to get rid of the random pat-downs. The American public is unhappy with them, they’re unhappy with the invasiveness of them.”

After reports surfaced of young children getting intense, random pat-downs, Paul said in the hearing,

“It just really just shows that no one is thinking… We need to be doing better police work and doing less of the universal giving up of our freedom to live our life the way we would like to live our life.”

Anyone having been out of the states or even read the news knows that women and children can carry bombs and terrorist items as well as adults.

Ron’s elitist notion that congress men and others should be excluded from pat downs shows how egalitarian his libertarianism is. Perhaps he would also enjoy the Arab states where princes can party and enjoy prostitutes while the average woman can’t even drive a car.

Golshifteh Farahani Poses Nude

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:42:26 -0500

Reposted from www.skepticmoney.com

Golshifteh Farahani the first Iranian to star in a major Hollywood film, Body of Lies, can now no longer return to Iran because she bared, cupped, her breasts in the French fashion Magazine Madame La Figaro.

Wait, doesn’t everyone pose nude in a French magazine? Have it published in Facebook, do a sex tape, become a star, retract the sex tape, and then go on to do more soft porn, uhh, I mean act? I am sorry. Her rights are too important to belittle the sad state of affairs in US female reality show acting these days.

Farahani won fame in her 2006 movie M for Mother and represented Iran when it won Best Foreign Film in 2008.

The Paris based model also starred in the 2007 film Santoori which has yet to be shown in Iran. The ministry of culture and Islamic guide have banned her from returning to Iran forever; declaring to her Iran doesn’t need actors or artists though she won the Best Actress award in Iran’s Fajr Film Festival. She had already been banned from leaving but now she can’t go back.

Democrats and Republicans Talk Past each Other

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 09:03:07 -0500

Reposted from www.skepticmoney.com

The Santorum family is taking a lot of heat in the press for their “do as I say, not as I do” family culture. Karen considered abortion while hubby worked to deny it. Rick wants the government to restrict access to contraceptives, force schools to educate extramarital sex is a sin, and criminalize abortion providers. Now it’s revealed that Karen lived with a boyfriend out of wedlock for nearly a decade in her twenties. And her boyfriend was an abortion provider.

The press is gleefully ignoring the general historical state of pubcon hypocrisy and hysterically reacting to their transgressions as signs that pubcons cannot differentiate personal belief from public policy. Liberals think if pubcons are to have such a standard they must themselves follow it.

Pubcons have reacted defensively at this attack and in some sort of Jedi mind trick are saying the past is history, people make mistakes, they are repentant, let’s move on, there’s nothing happening here.

But there is and it is an entire misunderstanding of how pubcons and liberals think differently about the world and morality. Their communication to each other, as brilliantly demonstrated by the current DC politics, in posturing and talking past individuals to the ideological bleachers behind. Both sides plead for consistency, purity, and insist they are true to their belief, faith, ideals, reasons, whatever. Obama is stuck like a duck in the middle and it would be no surprise if he were caught late at night wandering the White House halls in hebephrenic hysteria!

Rick Perry Out, Thank Goodness

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 09:02:13 -0500

Reposted from www.skepticmoney.com

Rick Perry has left the field. Thank goodness. After having Santorum win Iowa with a 34 vote margin in a state that doesn’t allow recounts and probably can’t count them right in the first place. But then it’s all about state rights, Perry is history. Remember Virginia where they wouldn’t put candidates on the ballet having lack of sufficient, validated petition signatures?

It seemed like the GOP would soften and go for Romney but in fact they didn’t, or I should say haven’t yet. Louise, my spouse, had been warning me about Santorum and I refused to believe that such a kook would ever be able to effectively run.

It only shows how incredibly desperate the GOP is. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised since more people believe the rapture is near than go out and vote. Hell, more people read the Left Behind series than go out and vote–at least that’s what it would seem here in the backwaters of West Virginia where even the squirrels attend church. I suppose it takes a hellfire, brimstone, family candidate to stir up enough interest to go prove them elitist, snobbish, expensive-coffee drinkers wrong. Everyone knows we’re the righteous travelers to heaven and the rest of you be damned.

Obama, Faith and Politics

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 09:00:52 -0500

Reposted from www.skepticmoney.com

Bits and pieces excerpted from President Obama’s 2006 speech, on faith and religion, are floating around recently. It is worth reading in its entirety. It is a full discussion of his gripes about liberals, conservatives, and their inability to come together based on faith; how and when does a person interject their religion or not into politics. Here is the entire most-quoted section in his “Call for Renewal”:

“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

This paragraph is slammed as renouncing bringing faith into politics. Religious folks do not want to consider whether their politics are good for everyone. It is as if they want Kant’s categorical imperative to be the realm of personal choice: “I believe the bible and so should everyone else and if I can’t make everyone believe the bible everything I believe in because of the bible should also be believed by all.” By this standard any personal choice could be universalized as insistence: I believe everyone should read Darwin and let’s make it law. Darwin is certainly more relevant than the bible. If I were stranded on a desert island I would bring Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and only because I don’t know of a more comprehensive single volume history; perhaps for you it would be Shakespeare or the Engineer’s Handbook, maybe a guide to rural technology?

Pubcons Aren't Stupid

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:12:39 -0500

Reposted and edited slightly from www.skepticmoney.com.

In my last post here, Sam Harris Coaches Mitt Romney, I lampooned Sam’s lampoon for being too real; I think he didn’t go far enough. Easy to do; some readers thought my post on Ministerial Exceptionalism was sarcastic, others facetious, and some down right wrong. When I read Sam’s post it was clear to me that pubcons could read it and think it was OK and not a satire.

I know it sounds reasonable for us to think that it is foolish to believe that Eden could have been in the states or that Mormons could be descended from the lost tribe of Israel. However, much of science and the world is a magic show and too often scientists are being taken to task for crap research. As decent debaters we have to assume that religious people believe their bullshit is true or at least believe that their belief in belief has value to them and why, and then deal with that. It does little good to demonstrate to a religious person their facts are wrong. They don’t believe in the inviability of evidence and frankly with how stupid scientists have been in bad research it’s not surprising.

Sam Harris Coaches Mitt Romney

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:08:32 -0500

Reposted from www.skepticmoney.com.

Sam Harris has written a speech for Mitt Romney exhibiting how Mitt could gain wider Republican and Conservative support by showing how his god is their god. Please Sam, I love you like a brother, but don’t do this to yourself. Is this a Machiavellian subterfuge to get pubs and cons to vote for a man against which Obama could win? Is it the converse that you would like to add some shred of dignity to their race by promoting the man who has the charisma and rugged good looks to win the popularity pageant?

Did I miss something and you really don’t want Obama to win and rather than working behind the scenes like the thug Karl Christian Rove you are just putting it out there? Finally, Sam, was this an exercise in how all of them actually believe in the same god period by fitting into the white-boy, cosmic club Judeo Christian? Would you say this if he had been a Buddhist or Hindi?

Did you wake up early, Ananka still sleeping, and impatient you decided to get up anyway and were flushed with a morning thought, a logic exercise: hey, I bet Mitt could win if he showed Mormonism is about their God too, hmm, what would that take?

Ministerial Exceptionalism

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:58:36 -0500

Reposted from www.skepticmoney.com

Wendy Kaminar writes at the Atlantic “In a closely watched religious liberty case, Hosannah Tabor v EEOC, the Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that churches enjoy broad, barely defined exemptions from civil rights laws in hiring and firing employees they classify as ministerial.” This is the biggest religious liberty case since 1990.

I paraphrase Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog: Clarence Thomas said this did not go far enough, as it did not throw out all such lawsuits. This is hard to believe since the court gave its blessing to provide exception to federal, state, and local laws against virtually any discrimination.

I say start a church and get some slaves, uhh, I mean workers; wait, aren’t we all slaves, uhh soldiers, to god, subservient to his benevolent authority? A “minister” can be any employee considered to be advancing the religious mission as well as congregational leaders. Justice Roberts said they were “reluctant to adopt a rigid formula for deciding when an employee qualifies as a minister.” I have been a janitor and I furthered the goals and means of the company. As janitorI worked far more than most other people there.

Tebowing Your Way to Heaven (Short Version)

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:49:13 -0500

Reposted from www.skepticmoney.com

It is impossible to miss news about Tim Tebow the fullback-sized quarterback of the Denver Broncos, who’s rookie-style moves have nevertheless enabled him to save the game usually near the end. He’s an erratic passer who can run like the wind and his statistics belie his success. He’s more famous than even Tom Brady of the Patriots though Brady is without doubt the better player.

Tebow has a penchant for bowing down to god on the field. While some cross themselves, high-five, or even dance a jig and stab the football into the turf, Tebow kneels down, helmet in hand touching the ground, other arm resting on his knee, lowers his head and, presumably, prays.

We should all wear our religious fealty on our sleeves! Santariaens can kill a chicken, Lakotans toss out a piece of tobacco and take a sweat, Digambar Janists shed their clothes and parade themselves, and my favorite, the Jewish Kaparot where they grasp a chicken by its shoulder blades and move it around their head three times. Who’s ritual shall we follow?

Tebowing Your Way to Heaven (Long Version)

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 10:07:09 -0500

The news today is filled with the Denver Bronco’s game against the New England Patriots next Sunday; by the time you read this the results will be in. I don’t normally follow football. When I scan Google news I usually skip over the Sports section to get to Health or Special Interests. My Grandfather in Fargo, North Dakota was an avid Minnesota Vikings fan. During holidays he and the men would sit in the living room and watch sports. I would hang out in the kitchen cherry picking treats and listening to relationship talk until they shooed me away and I‘d go read or work on some project.

I did play football in Jr High for a year but I wasn’t aggressive or big enough for the monster offensive tackle guys that always opposed me. Occasionally, I watch a game with my friends but it’s about liquor and companionship; I do know that a tight end doesn’t mean the potential of an especially good time romping--a cheap joke often told by neophytes.

It is impossible to miss news about Tim Tebow, the fullback-sized, quarterback of the Denver Broncos, who’s rookie-style moves have nevertheless enabled him to save the game usually near the end. He’s an erratic passer who can run like the wind and his statistics belie his success. New Englanders no doubt know less of him as shown by www.boston.com in a rush of articles the last few days. He’s more famous than Tom Brady of the Patriots though Brady is without doubt the better player. The odds are 13-5 in favor of the Patriots. Tim has famously said “I can’t play” though he was named Florida’s player of the year two years in a row.

Prayer, Family, and Sucking Up

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 07:33:13 -0500

Our language is filled with religious references and euphemisms, from the contraction Goodbye of “god be with ye” to bless you from the pagen bletsian. It is quite remarkable how much religious people wish to assert their faith through verbal expressionism. I have an aunt-in-law who voices a miracle in near every twist and turn of the world, a Quaker friend who writes Christmas letters that are more god filled than any given passage of the bible, and even my vampire loving teen daughter cusses with religious epithets that replace ubiquitous conjunctions like like and um.

This private group think language does get tedious. While Wittgenstein would merely call this another language game, an attribute he leant to lying as well, to be learned, most of us wish to use language reflective of either our own world view or that of the greater world in which we participate. These holy words to a bright are like ashes deconstructed from past significance that mean little, or are paeans to past oppressions we’d sooner forget. Why should we casually praise the supremely subnatural (to subvert its superiority) dictator in our everyday language? Why should I happily participate in their narcissistic expression of class superiority? Love goes so far; respect needs to be returned.

Bright, Public or Private

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 08:06:32 -0400

Austin Dacey in "The Secular Conscience" discusses two liberal fallacies. The Privacy Fallacy and the Liberty Fallacy.

The Privacy Fallacy "consists in assuming that because matters of conscience are private in the sense of nongovernmental, they are private in the sense of personal preference."

The Liberty Fallacy follows as "The indispensable principle of freedom has been mutated into an unthinking assumption that matters of belief are immune to critical public inquiry and shared evaluative norms."

His position as stated in the Introduction, "...conscience is open in the sense of being socially protected from coercive power, open to public evaluation and discussion on the basis of shared standards, and open to future development, change, and revision. In other words it is characterized by liberty, objectivity, and revision."

He no longer excludes religious discussion from public discourse. We do have a history of open politics. The long progress of the polis. The marketplace of ideas where there is a free exchange of ideas.

Brightness for All or Just Me

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 09:54:00 -0400

A primary concern of my coming out as a bright is whether I want everyone to be bright. I have many friends of all ilk. I can easily nightmare a scenario where they will say "you don't want me to evangelize and yet you expect me to follow your bright path" and then leave.

As usual I don't see arguments as linear, or abstracted singularities. Kant holds that I should act as I would know that others should act in my place. People who hold their sacred text as prime authority consider everyone should share in their good news and follow that path. Multivarient beliefs where everyone should be free to do as they wish is singular in its utterance; all should let all be. For those who believe on exemplifying only, as a role model gagged to public invocation, the actor is single and alone. They may only show how to behave.

Every one of these is monothematic. Every one of these insists on a conformance. All of them wish to have others do as they see as best for the world. They are all moral positions as well.