I’m very glad to see this particular Dope leave office. While I would stop short of wishing him ill health, I must say that he has been a truly awful Pope/Dope, in my opinion.
Remember, this is the Dope who said that the indigenous peoples of the Americas had been silently longing for Christianity to come … and to enslave and slaughter them.
This is also the Dope who threatened to excommunicate women who were so religious that they wanted to be priests. Way to win points with your female followers. Dope.
The one downside is the very real possibility that Richard Dawkins is right about the Dope, that he will destroy the whole rotten edifice of the Catholic Church.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Good-bye Dope Nazinger!
* Though I don’t support what ArkCode does, I hope and suspect that the author will not mind my use of this image in this way, especially with the link to his post underneath. Barry, if I am incorrect and you would like this removed, please post a comment and I will remove it as soon as I see your comment. Thanks.
Under the influence of the painkiller Dilaudid, and dog-tired after another day of fighting for my life with my private health insurance company, I glimpsed Mitt Romney and his running-mate, Paul Ryan, entering my Los Angeles hospital room dressed in surgical gowns with scalpels in their hands ready to fatally operate on me.
It was a drug-induced hallucination, of course. But the mirage made me sit bolt upright in bed and, fully awake, start to rethink my previous, bitterly dissenting view of Barack Obama.
Congressman Paul Broun has publicly stated that he is deliberately failing to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States of America. As such, he should be forcibly removed from office for the failure to follow his oath of office. Here is a direct quote from this idiot who has proclaimed that the earth is 9,000 years old, and that evolution, the big bang theory, and embryology are lies straight from the pit of hell.
As you congressman, I hold the holy bible as being the major directions to me for how I vote in Washington DC. And, I’ll continue to do that.
Paul Broun’s act of legislating based on his personal religious beliefs is in direct contradiction to this famous quote.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ….
I’ve titled this post Misanthropia because I believe that I have every bit as much chance of making these improvements as I do of creating a true Utopia, i.e. none.
Still, I’m going to label each suggestion either plausible or implausible. The plausible changes will be the ones I expect never to have implemented because the Koch brothers and other multi-gazillionaires own all of our politicians and control the whole system by which they are put in place. However, I expect that I would be able to convince most of the so-called 99% that these changes would be good. The implausible are the ones I feel strongly enough about to post despite the extreme likelihood that they are so radical that I couldn’t even convince a significant percentage of the so-called 99%.
Each of the following suggestions or cluster of suggestions are meant to be taken individually. I believe each on its own could help make the U.S. a better country. That said, even were all of these suggestions implemented tomorrow, I do not expect that it would fix all of our problems. I’m not that smart.
Here’s a bit of humorous irony. With all of the religious folks who want to legislate their Bible morality on the LBGT community and deny them the same rights to marriage that the rest of us have, it seems they’ve missed the real threat to marriage. Remember these folks are claiming that somehow if a homosexual couple marries, my own 23 year and counting marriage will be weakened. Huh? Well, they are saying that gay marriage will weaken the institution of marriage. I don’t claim to understand this argument at all.
However, the real threat to marriage seems to be the civil unions they dreamed up in response to the perfectly reasonable request that homosexuals be allowed to marry.
In France, where they have now had civil unions for a decade, what has really happened is that heterosexuals have said enough of the death-do-us-part tradition of marriage. Overwhelming numbers of heterosexual couples are choosing the far easier to break contract of a civil union.
Oh horrors!! This could put divorce lawyers out of business.
Here’s an interesting post containing a whole bunch of information about traditional marriage, meaning real traditional marriage, not what is being touted today. I had known, of course, that polygyny (polygamy is multiple spouses [spice?] without specifying which sex; polyandry is multiple husbands; polygyny is multiple wives) was common in biblical times. And, of course, I had known that for much of history, especially since agrarian times, that marriage was a business deal. However, there is much about the marriage ceremony and about today’s ceremony and its origins that did surprise me. Anyway, if your idea of traditional marriage as one man marrying one woman in a house of worship, this may surprise you.
Perhaps this will give you something to consider the next time someone suggests that we need a constitutional amendment defining marriage. In my not so humble opinion, any couple or group of people who want to legally declare themselves life partners should be allowed to do so. The only issues are figuring out the tax code and ensuring that the law does not discriminate. If we choose to allow polygamy, the law must truly allow any number of partners of either sex. I, for one, wouldn’t want a law that specified polygyny or polyandry, but left out the other.
OK. I’m an atheist. I do not even truly believe that Jesus as a flesh and blood human ever walked the planet. However, this fictional character plays a large part in many people’s lives and, unfortunately, their voting decisions. Perhaps, if people really think about Jesus when voting though they just might come up with different answers. So, I address this post to the believers.
So, contrary to my usual rants where I take a radical and non-standard stance in order to point out the violence in the Bible. In this post, I am going to hypothetically take the more mainstream view of Jesus. First, I’m going to pretend that I believe he actually existed. Then, I’m going to cherry pick the Bible, not in the way I did in my Thou Shalt Kill post, but instead, in the way that most religious people do when they respond to my usual assertions about the mythical character.
So, in short, I’m going to point to the nice things Jesus is supposed to have said. And then, given the mainstream view of Jesus, I’m going to discuss his political views and see how well they align with today’s religious right. Then, I’m going to attempt to address the issue of how Jesus might vote in an election if he were alive today. Finally, I will point out that if Christianity is about people attempting to be Jesus-like to the best of their ability, then religious Christians should vote that way. Let’s see how this goes.
Also, check out the incredibly impressive Heart of the Adirondacks project in the Adirondack State Park, the largest park in the continental United States at twice the size of Yellowstone.
Posted by Misanthropic Scott 
