ChaoSkeptic

This is a selected reading from the audiobook version of the Illuminatus Trilogy:

Recent message broadcast on Bryan Fisher's radio program:

There's this odd collaboration between Discordians in America and Muslims. Discordians reject the Judeo-Christian tradition just like Islam does and that's where, I think, the linkage is. I mean, you look at Islam, they're going to behead homosexuals; Discordians want them coronated; we want them helped. So these are poles apart, so why is it that Discordians in America are so fond of and go to bat for Muslims all the time? It makes no sense in any kind of rational world.

But there isn't any rationality in Discordianism. It's not rational. It's not logical. It violates everything we know about history, everything we know about logic, everything we know about morality. All of those are violated by a Discordian worldview. So what is that they share in common? Well, I think what they share in common, the reason that they bond together, you know the enemy of my enemy is my friend, they both have in common one enemy: the Judeo-Christian system of values, the Judeo-Christian system of truth claims and values. They both hate the Judeo-Christian tradition with equal with equal passion and so that's what bonds them together.

And they hate America with equal passion. And they hate democracy. They hate freedom of speech, they hate freedom of association. So what Muslims and Discordians share together is this hatred of the United States, this hatred of classical American values, this hatred of the Judeo-Christian values system.

And the illustration of the way in which Muslims hate democracy just as much as "Erisians" do ... I'm not saying "as much" because Muslims are willing to go much further in their opposition to democracy than Discordians are. They'll try to shut you down, they'll try to engage in electoral fraud, they will try to use intimidation, they will try to use the courts, they will try to shout you down, but so far they haven't taken to killing people.

In America there are strange norms when it comes to sex. There is a constant shroud of silence when it comes to what goes on in bedrooms. Every church (and until recently even the government) constantly preached that sex is a dirty bad thing that should be saved for marriage. There is a supernatural mystique when it comes to virginity (especially for women). It is not considered a state of mind but as a physical thing that you can lose like a sock in the dryer. We even have Purity Balls where fathers and daughters worship her virginity like a fetish doll. We have to be the most sexually dysfunctional country in history.

And that's why I get a perverse thrill out of American sex studies. They have a way of ripping off the veil for everyone to see how we actually feel about sex and not just the company line we mouth when the children are around.

My favorite all time favorite study was released by the Guttmacher Institute in 2007. It was entitled "Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954–2003". The title alone makes me giddy with excitement. The most important part of the study says this:

Of those interviewed in 2002, 95% reported they had had premarital sex; 93% said they did so by age 30. Among women born in the 1940s, nearly nine in 10 did. At the same time, people are waiting longer to marry; 2005 data show median age at first marriage is just over 25 for women and 27 for men.

That's right. All of us are horny hypocrites. It is almost a guarantee that every single abstinence-only educator and pontificating preacher had sex before they were married. (Hell, your grandparents most likely had sex before marriage. Wrap your head around that!) The same people saying that sex before marriage will leave you a sad husk that no one will love anymore and that you will get every single STD simultaneously did the horizontal mambo before marriage and turned out just fine.

This is one of the reasons I've been against abstinence only education for a long time. It's not just that is scientifically proven to not work and in many instances increases the number of teen pregnancies and STD rates. It is unrealistic model of how the world works. It's an outright lie. And if you lie to kids you'll have to face the D.A.R.E. effect where kids can no longer tell the truth from the propaganda and end up making bad decisions.


And I said all that to talk about a new study by Guttmacher that came out today called "Religion and Contraceptive Use". Another great title. The key findings of this study were:

• Among all women who have had sex, 99% have ever used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning. This figure is virtually the same among Catholic women (98%).

• Among sexually active women of all denominations who do not want to become pregnant, 69% are using a highly effective method (i.e., sterilization, the pill or another hormonal method, or the IUD).

• Some 68% of Catholic women use a highly effective method, compared with 73% of Mainline Protestants and 74% of Evangelicals.

• Only 2% of Catholic women rely on natural family planning; this is true even among Catholic women who attend church once a month or more.

The big things I want to point out are that 98% of Catholic women use contraception and only 2% use the "rhythm method". 98%! Try to wrap your head around that because I can't. For those not up on Roman Catholic dogma, contraception is considered a mortal sin. Pope Paul VI called it "seriously evil". The current pope, Benedict XV, said that handing out condoms "aggravates the problems" when it comes to AIDs.

And 98% of American Catholic women are collectively saying, "Fuck the motherfucking pope". They would rather risk the fate of their soul than be told how to control their bodies. To that I say, "You go, girl!" (Do people still say that?) But I also say, "Why the hell do you put up with this shit?" Obviously a bunch of old men in dresses who've (allegedly) never had sex shouldn't be giving other people marriage advice. People need to stand up and tell them to be more realistic.

Oh, that's right! Women aren't allowed to have leadership positions in the Catholic Church. Silly me. Maybe several centuries from now they'll change their minds about the whole thing. There might not be anyone left to care at that point.

Yeah, I'm being lazy and making my fifth post in a row with a video. I think this one is worth it though. It's the first part of a news special by British journalist Louis Theroux about the Westboro Baptist Church. WBC, of course, is the hyper-fundamentalist group run by Fred and Shirley Phelps that likes to picket places with signs that say "God Hates Fags". I'm torn about the group personally. I feel that they have a first amendment right to picket in public and hold up whatever hateful slogans that they want. (Their Supreme court case is touched on briefly in this program.) On the other hand, I feel that they are attention whores who are experts at trolling the media. They almost always draw counter-protests that are 10-100 times bigger than they are. If everyone ignored them they would eventually go away.

However this special does do a good job of humanizing them. For the most part Louis Theroux let's them speak their minds and occasionally probes them with questions. He disagrees with him but doesn't yell at them, which is what almost everyone else would be tempted to do. Most of the interviews are with the younger female members, and several female members that have left the group.

The eeriest part of the whole special is that I actually understood the Christianese that the members were using. While growing up I attended Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal churches. The fire-and-brimstone I heard back then isn't radically different from the stuff coming out of Shirley and her daughters' mouths. Yes, they are on the very very far end of the bell curve but they share more in common with your everyday fundamental, Sola Scriptura Calvinist than they do with me. (If you look very closely you will see a TULIP poster behind Fred while he is preaching.)

The thesis that Louis is trying to pull out of the special is that the WBC group is losing members because their religious beliefs are robbing them of their humanity. The girls are not able to date, the boys aren't allowed to have friends outside of the family, the parents aren't allowed to talk to their children once they are exiled from the church. Strangely none of them seem to be angry or intentionally hateful. Their language is toxic but never venomous. The memes of their religion have taken over their minds and they don't even realize what is coming out of their mouth anymore.

Even weirder is that the Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs effect does not seem to be in play here. I think Fred's beliefs were so out there to begin with that "cooling" them even further doesn't nothing at all.




I'll just embed part one and link to the rest:

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

It took forever but the animated version of Tim Minchin's "Storm" has finally been uploaded to Youtube. I could have sworn it was supposed to have be released about 6 months ago. Oh well, good things come to those who wait...

Let us all rise and open our Discordian Hymnal to Page #035 "Suspect Device" by Stiff Little Fingers