Right-Wingers Threaten to Beat Health Teacher over "Bless You!" Ban

A health teacher wants his kids to stop saying "Bless you!" after someone sneezes. He reminds the kids that we actually learned about germs and stuff a century or two ago. A sneeze, it turns out, isn't your body's attempt to expel demons! To drive the point home, teacher Steve Cuckovich is deducting points from a student's score when the student says "Bless you!" in response to a sneeze.

Cuckovich sounds like a great teacher to me, one with a sense of humor and a way to drive a point home to the students. Maybe a bit idealistic, but his heart is in the right place. But the reader comments at the end article ... well ... I'm speechless. This has to go into the "quoted without comment" category. It speaks for itself.

redwhiteandblueuniverse: "Steve Cuckovich, Mind your own business and stop acting as though you have any authority ... Try pushing your personal beliefs on my child and I will beat your ass. Period, end of story."

rogers1756: "Amen. This teacher needs to be slapped off his mock pedestal of intellectual superiority. This is what the progressives would have if they had their way ... Typical Hillary fascist mind control ..."

Danger! Halloween Candy is Cursed by Witches!

Seriously people. Can this be real? The author, Kimberly Daniels, lives in a fairyland world filled with demons, spirits, witches, vampires, and of course Lucifer and God. It's hilarious ... except that it's not a joke.

The really scary part of this is that it's not some random nobody. It was published as a guest blog in Charisma, a serious Christian news site with a large following. Here's what Daniels says about Halloween:

Paranormal Explorers: Serious Ghost Hunting!

Here's a bit of amusement for today: Paranormal Explorers. These guys are apparently serious. Got a ghost problem? Give 'em a call!

The site speaks for itself, so I'll say no more.

Banned Books: The Dark Side of Religion

Here is a great web site: The American Library Association's Banned Books List. It's a testament to the stupidity of religious morality.

From the top 100 books of the last 100 years, the great majority have been banned at one time or another. Looking at this list, I just don't get it. Almost to the last book, they strike me as great literature. But with religious "morality" one can never tell...

1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses, by James Joyce
7. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
9. 1984, by George Orwell
11. Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
15. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

So of the top 20 novels of the past century, only three were not the target of banning attempts! What were those three?

10. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
13. Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce

OK, so maybe back in the 1940s and 1950s people were more conservative. Surely things have gotten better. Right? Wrong. Here are the top ten most-often-banned books

Is the Collective Republican IQ Really This Low?

Here's a rather frightening poll. If these statistics are true, the Republican party should be ashamed of itself. Either that, or else the collective IQ of the Republican Party is so abysmal it's not smart enough to be ashamed. According to a new poll:

• 57% of Republicans still believe Obama is a Muslim. (Ironic, given that he actually may be a closet atheist.)
• 45% of Republicans still believe Obama wasn't born in the United States, even though the State of Hawaii produced his official birth certificate, and a notice of his birth was published in the newspaper.

You think those numbers are scary? There's one more:

• 24% of Republicans think Obama is the antichrist. (Do they even know what an antichrist is?)

I think I'm in the wrong line of work. Spreading truth and wisdom is such an uphill battle, maybe I should give up and instead just spread drivel that people want to believe. It's so much easier.

How can people believe this utter nonsense in the face of clear and compelling facts?

I'd be willing to bet that the the fraction of Republicans who believe this drivel are the same ones who were raised in fundamentalist, evangelical churches.

Look Who's Irrational Now: It's the Wall Street Journal

One of my persistent critics left a link to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, by columnist Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, hoping to show me the error of my ways. Alas for my critic, Hemingway's article is so deeply flawed that I can't let it pass. Someone has to refute this illogical article.

Hemingway tries to claim that Christianity makes people more rational, and less susceptible to superstition, such as belief in ghosts, spirits, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, communicating with the dead, and other superstitions. And indeed, the WSJ cites studies that "prove" this: The more conservative or evangelical a person is, the less likely they are to believe in these superstitions.

Have you spotted the flaw in this logic yet?

The problem is that Hemingway divides the world into three camps: Christian (presumably the "true" belief system), supersition, and Atheist. But that's wrong. The factual foundation for belief in Yahweh is just as weak as belief in ghosts, astrology, communicating with the dead, reincarnation, and thousands of other acts of pure faith.

In other words, there are only two camps, not three: People who rely on faith, and people who derive their understanding from observable facts and rational deductions based on those facts. Thus, where the Christian sees evangelical beliefs as a way to push out false religions, the Atheist merely sees a large number of undistinguished faiths that compete with each other for believers. There is no fundamental difference between Christianity and other supersitions. This is very hard for most Christians to accept, and it frequently leads authors like Hemingway into this same logical fallacy.

From a memetic point of view, there is a large collection of faith-memeplexes that are competing for survival, competing for believers. Christianity is one of the most successful of these memeplexes, because among other things, it developed a strong Intolerance Meme that requires exclusivity from its adherents. Thus, it's no surprise that Christianity and "superstitions" are incompatible.

So all WSJ article really has to say is that the Christian Intolerance Meme is pretty successful. If a person buys into the Christian memeplex, they're less likely to accept any of the other faith-memeplexes.

From an Atheist point of view, the author of the WSJ article hasn't said anything interesting about Atheism at all. All the auther did is show that faith-based systems compete with each other. No surprise there.

Tags: Wall Street Journal ghosts astrology paranormal superstition loch ness religion christian atheist atheism