Twain's Ghost

Putting the Super back in Superstition!

On job-security kick, Pope Benedict the 16th warns against atheism

In an attempt to secure the livelihood of countless thousands of hyperventilating bible-thumpers and modern-looking witchdoctors, Pope Benedict released an encyclical (recyclical, if you ask me) denouncing among other things atheism. Atheism could not be reached for comment, but its publicist said "My client supports the right of the pope to be an idiot."

This is key of course. If atheism becomes popular, where will the religious charlatans be? Out in the cold looking for real jobs, that's where! How will they maintain their wealth and power? They won't, that's what!

Even though plenty of theologians have over the centuries come to realize (if reluctantly) the fraudulent nature of religion, it's dishonest and bloody rise, it is against the interests of the theocrats to let this cat out of the bag. Facts are not the point. Truth is not the point. The point is faith - a warm and fuzzy word for stubborn stupidity. As the Bible likes to say, "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."  Perhaps it sounds nice until you put it another way, like, "faith is evidence of Mother Goose." Is it really? Of course not! It's a bit like saying purple dreams are evidence of pole-vaulting pretzels. Yes, exactly, its pure fertilizer.

In the big time "Clash of Civilizations", does it help to become more like your purported enemies?

Mohammed the Teddy Bear, Jesus the Singing Bunny

Fox News (the Mullahs of American "Traditionalism") noted that crazy people in the Sudan (and they are crazy) wanted to execute an English schoolteacher in their country for allowing her Sudanese students to name a teddy bear Mohammed. Though the extremists there want her to die, the more reasonable Islamic authorities in Khartoum only sentenced her to 15 days in prison and deportation for "insulting religion" (CNN). Both reactions, though one is definitely more palatable, are insane fundamentalist responses to a nothing incident. If you want to have faith, how about having faith in an innocent schoolteacher and her innocent students who are having an innocent moment naming a teddy bear with a common Muslim name. Have faith in that! Fuck Mohammed and all the non-prophets and Jesus and his winged demons, too. They are a blight on this world, an absolute pestilence, a disease of the heart and the mind. But, since they are imaginary, let me say what I really mean: Fuck the insane idiocy of those that push this kind of inhumanist superstition - east and west. And make no mistake: it is insane idiocy. It is the reason people burn witches and blow themselves up in pizza shops.

For the Islamists, the idea is that naming a teddy bear Mohammed is tantamount to idolatry - meaning worshiping 'graven images', or to put it another way, inanimate objects that look like something looking back at you. Have faith, they'd say, not in inanimate objects, but in invisible entities. It's the same mental illness that caused the Taliban nutcases to demolish the giant Bamayan buddhas before 9-11. Worshipping graven images (or just giving them a name) is evil, but murdering people who don't share your wacky beliefs is sacred! That's the message.

Fortunately, religion in the West was put in check by the rise of rationalism. (Though stupid religionists use it on their side, few people remember that when Thomas Jefferson said
"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" he was being ironic since he meant also the tyranny of religion.) But no such battles are permanently won. And unfortunately, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, the bitch that bore religion is still in heat. Christians in America (and elsewhere) who demand that, contrary to the Constitution, dominant religious ideas and expressions and symbols remain front and center in the public sphere are only one loosening screw [link]  away from the likes of the Taliban beheaders and Buddha-smashers (who voted for Sanjaya just to ruin our beloved 'American Idol'). The difference is that there are not sad masses of dumb, desperate and oppressed people in the West like there are in the Middle East and elsewhere in the former Third World. But the way the West is going, there may be soon.

Osama Made Me Do It

Recall another chapter in the War on Reason: Bill "I'm a 'traditionalist', not a right-wing wacko" O'Reilly has often denounced those unbelievers in the Official "Osama Did It" Conspiracy Theory as "pinheads" - as distinct from "patriots" who buy into the fairy tale of Al Qaeda wickedness and U.S. government innocent braveness, or brave innocentness. Nationalist fanatic, is that what "Tabloid" O'Reilly means by "traditionalist"?

All of these stories - from Popish calls for more faith, to Islamist denunciations against teddy bear namers, to the irrational promotion of officially-sanctioned 9-11 myths - are of a piece. And the defenders of these beliefs all use the same tactics, fear and denunciation - and, if we let them, ultimately murder and mayhem. That's the real culture war, Billy Boy. Christopher Hitchens, like a broken clock, is right some times.

Take a stand for sanity: trust your doubts, name your penis (or the penis of a friend) Mohammed (but don't worship it unless it is very much animate) and read David Ray Griffin's Debunking 9-11 Debunking.

Defeat Al Qaeda!

When the Cold War ended, we were thrilled, for sure. But we also felt a little lost, didn't we? Who are we? Where are we? Why are we here? Why do we have the most expensive and bloated military machine in the world, sprawled across half the planet? God (and Lockheed Martin) knows. We stumbled a bit, looking for our special purpose. But then, a miracle occurred: Al Qaeda magically appeared. It was as if God knew we would have to have a reason to keep up Cold War level military spending and throw our weight around. The Project for a New American Century (a 1990s think tank filled with beloved Reaganites and Bushies, who, thank Jehovah, took power in 2000) knew this; they acknowledged that if we were to "grow" our domination of the world, it would require a "catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." Well, from their lips to God's ears. That was in 2000. Just one year later they got their "new Pearl Harbor" - 9/11. And people say God is not on our side! So, expect miracles, but in the meantime...

Defeat Al Qaeda!

Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook may have said in 2005 that "Al Qaeda" is not a real terrorist organization, but rather an Arabic term the CIA used to refer to its 'database' of mujahideen trained with their buddy Osama bin Laden in the 1980's, but we know that is just Old Europe raining on our parade (or, peeing on our perceptions, to put it another way). Cook died a month after saying that. Clearly Al Qaeda killed him for saying they were just a CIA computer file. And anyway, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you think Al Qaeda doesn't exist as such, it makes it really hard to convince yourself that we must in fact...

Defeat Al Qaeda!

The situation's so dire there's no time for liberal distractions like the fact that Ali Mohamed, former Egyptian intelligence officer and U.S. Army Green Beret, linked to the CIA (including as a jihadi in Afghanistan while he was a member of the U.S. Army), shielded by the FBI and kept as an informant, and who wrote Al Qaeda's training manual, was a trainer and guiding hand in nearly all of Al Qaeda's early operations, including: the assassination of Zionist hero Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990 (Al Qaeda's first act), the 1993 WTC bombing, the foiled 1993 "Day of Terror" plot, the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa. (He was in U.S. custody during 9/11 and apparently remains there, publicly unsentenced.) A veritable mastermind, you might say. And just because the State Department complained that Ali remained free after many opportunities for the U.S. to grab him, it doesn't mean the U.S. government was helping him, even though it was like when the CIA gave him a special visa even though he was on a terrorist watch list. But anyway Liberals and other foreigners infiltrate the State Department! The FBI shielded him from prosecution in order to, well, do something really important for national security. The Feds want us to ignore Ali's existence, so let's ignore it, patriotically. Real patriots, like Senator Craig, don't ask and don't tell. But they do remember that we must...

Defeat Al Qaeda!

The links between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda were all non-existent - in that annoying liberal sort of truthy way. But after the smashing success of our invasion and occupation, the link is there now, isn't it? So stop your liberal bitching. Recall also the Iraq war might have really gone sideways if it wasn't for Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). And we mean 'sideways' in the sense that matters: an unmanageable increase in the already overwhelming public opposition to the continuation of the war. AQI saved our butts - the butts that is of the 20 to 30 % that never, ever ask why or how long when it comes to war even if it is criminal, fraudulent and badly managed. Forget that the presence of 'foreign fighters' in Iraq (other than our own) is pretty miniscule and that the operations and size of Al Qaeda in Iraq is greatly exaggerated. AQI is a menace even if it's "microscopic" according to fancy liberal experts like U.S. intelligence officers. Reality has a liberal bias, too. General David Petrayus can be believed simply because he wears a uniform: AQI is small, but big, insignificant, but important. We're fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq so we don't have to invent Al Qaeda in America and then fight them.

Remember: Al Qaeda might be a fabulous fabrication, but that doesn't mean it's not real!

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A By-Golly-You're-Right production of Citizens Against Ruining Patriotism, in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Formulating Popular Certainty