(ValerieTarico.com) – Valerie Tarico:
For most of Christian history, those furry little creatures were associated with sex, not chocolate. …
Archive for April, 2019
Easter Bunnies
2019-04-21Easter
2019-04-21
Values That Saved the West
2019-04-20(Richard Carrier Blogs) – Richard Carrier:
Novelist Tom Holland just wrote an article for The Spectator titled “Thank God for Western Values,” declaring the “debt of the West to Christianity is more deeply rooted than many might presume.” Everything he says is false. …
Dignitas and its related ideas, even in the sense of the common worth of persons, was already a widely known pagan concept. So Christianity can’t claim to have invented it. And valuing freedom, rights, and autonomy was all a pagan idea. Invented legally by Greek and Roman constitutionalists, and developed philosophically by Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics. The Enlightenment laureates who brought them back from the dead, to re-paganize Christianity with them, did so against opposition from Christian authorities. The “taboos” we inherited from Christianity are, rather, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, even racism and anti-semitism, and an unhealthy obsession with monogamy and a pathological phobia of human sexuality in general. In other words, garbage we need to get rid of; not praise or be thankful for. …
Magic Chocolate Eggs
2019-04-20(Jesus and Mo) – Mo: “You have to admit Easter is rather confusing.” …
jesusandmo.net/2014/04/16/eggs
No One Listens to the President
2019-04-19(Atlantic Politics) – David A. Graham:
Trump keeps issuing orders, and staffers keep ignoring them because they’re illegal or unwise. It’s an unsustainable situation—but it shows no sign of abating. …
theatlantic 2019/04 no-one-listens
Stick Figure Iconography: Portia
2019-04-19(Good Tickle Brain) – Mya Gosling:
We’ve had Rosalind and Viola, so let’s take a look at another one of Shakespeare’s famous cross-dressing heroines! …
goodticklebrain iconography-portia
The Crucifixion Story Makes No Sense
2019-04-19(Cross Examined) – Bob Seidensticker:
I’m afraid that the crucifixion story doesn’t strike me as that big a deal.
The Christian will say that death by crucifixion was a horrible, humiliating way to die. That the death of Jesus was a tremendous sacrifice, more noble and selfless than a person sacrificing himself for the benefit of a butterfly. And isn’t it worth praising something that gets us into heaven?
Here are ten reasons why I’m unimpressed.
- Sure, death sucks, but why single out this one? …
- What about that whole hell thing? …
- Jesus didn’t even die. …
- Taking on the sin vs. removal of sin aren’t symmetric. …
- The reason behind the sacrifice—mankind’s original sin—makes no sense. …
- Jesus made a sacrifice—big deal. …
- What is left for God to forgive? …
- The Jesus story isn’t even remarkable within mythology. …
- The Bible itself rejects God’s savage “justice.” …
- The entire story is incoherent. …
crossexamined crucifixion-story
Stick Figure Iconography: Coriolanus
2019-04-18(Good Tickle Brain) – Mya Gosling:
Close your eyes…
Imagine Coriolanus …
… is he covered in blood?
Good. We’re on the same page. …
goodticklebrain iconography-coriolanus
A Notre-Dame 3D Laser-Scan Template
2019-04-17(Atlantic Tech) – Alexis C. Madrigal:
In 2010, Andrew Tallon, an art professor at Vassar, took a Leica ScanStation C10 to Notre-Dame and, with the assistance of Columbia’s Paul Blaer, began to painstakingly scan every piece of the structure, inside and out.
Now, with the building having sustained very substantial damage, the data that Tallon and Blaer created could be an invaluable aid to whoever is charged with rebuilding the structure. …
theatlantic 2019/04 rebuild-notre-dame
A Matter of Life and Death
2019-04-16(Guardian Film) – Peter Bradshaw:
Powell and Pressburger’s wartime drama, starring David Niven as an erroneously alive bomber pilot, is visually extraordinary and politically topical. …
Religion and Sex
2019-04-16(Debunking Christianity) – Teresa Roberts:
Growing up in a genuine American cult, I soon learned that my body created a problem for the men in the church. Even as a young girl, I was expected to dress modestly and conduct myself in a way that would become a woman of god — with shamefacedness and sobriety. Except for my neck, hands and head, all else must be covered. Bare skin, even the shape of my body beneath my clothes could be used by the devil to cause a man to sin. According to the brethren, sexual thoughts were as bad as sexual deeds. If I shirked my duty as the sexual gate keeper, I could be the cause of god sending men’s souls to hell.
Of course, I’d end up in the burning lake of fire, too, as a great seductress. …
debunking 2019/04 religion-and-sex
Goodreads: Teresa Roberts: Have We Been Screwed? Trading Freedom for Fairy Tales
Out of Blue
2019-04-15(Guardian Film) – Mark Kermode:
Patricia Clarkson’s homicide cop is the enigma in the director’s inspired reworking of Martin Amis‘s crime novel Night Train. …
Like all of Carol Morley’s films, Out of Blue has some ragged edges that may alienate unsympathetic viewers. But having now seen the film three times, I find myself loving it all the more for its imperfections. When a film-maker aims this high, how can one do anything but watch in wonder? …
theguardian 2019/mar/31 out-of-blue
Jesus : His Life
2019-04-15(Debunking Christianity) – R.G. Price:
When I heard about History’s new TV special, Jesus : His Life, I was quite interested to see how they were going to handle the subject. As the author of the recently published book, Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed, obviously I knew that my perspective on the subject would be different than whatever might be presented, but I was still quite interested to see how they were going to present the subject matter. …
The bigger point here, and the reason that I bothered reviewing this program, is that this is the type of material that drives public perception of our knowledge of Jesus. It’s not the academic publications or hard-core biblical scholarship, it’s programs like this that lead people to believe that our knowledge of Jesus is far more reliable, clear and certain than what it really is. As it turns out, this program doesn’t even present poor scholarship, it just presents outright propaganda and church doctrine as fact. …
#IStandWithIlhanOmar
2019-04-14(Common Dreams) – Andrea Germanos:
“The president is inciting violence against a sitting Congresswoman—and an entire group of Americans based on their religion,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren. …
Other observers saw Trump’s tweet as an opportunity to remind the public of how the president viewed the 9/11 attacks at the time. …
commondreams 2019/04/13 life-danger
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
2019-04-14(Guardian Film) – Peter Bradshaw:
Despite its absurdity and button-pushing bad taste, this mock epic stands up four decades on as a stirring paean to tolerance. …
A Religion Obsessed with Blood
2019-04-14(Patheos::Godless in Dixie) – Neil Carter:
It’s amazing how different your upbringing can look to you after you get some distance from it. I grew up holding certain things as sacred which I now realize are nothing of the sort. Or perhaps I should say I see now that “sacredness” is a subjective value assigned to a thing by an individual or group. What makes it “sacred” is that it’s sacred to them.
Outside that group, however, the magic disappears. Things you once imbued with supernatural importance now look like, well…just things. There isn’t really anything special about them. The exceptionalism you were taught to see in your family’s traditions turns out to be a remarkably common thing.
Let’s take a look at the inescapably barbaric roots of the Christian faith …
godlessindixie obsessed-with-blood
jf 